Romanian Citizenship Legislation 1866-1918: Emancipation of 'Non-Citizens

European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire, Vol. 8, No.
2, 2001
The Unyielding Boundaries of

Citizenship: The Emancipation of
‘Non-Citizens’ in Romania, 1866–1918
CONSTANTIN IORDACHI
Department of History, Central European University, Budapest
ABSTRACT This article attempts to contribute historical data to studies of the emergence and
development of the institution of citizenship in Romania. Designed as an overview of Romanian
citizenship legislation between 1866 and 1918, the article focuses on the contradiction between
claims for the universality of bourgeois-democratic liberal ideology and the hierarchic and
illiberal citizenship practice, which disenfranchised a considerable number of men, denied women
substantive civic and political rights and excluded from state citizenship signi cant ethnic and
religious minorities. Special attention is devoted to the legal status of these categories of
‘non-citizens,’ to their strategies of emancipation and their relationship with the Romanian
national ideology.
There has recently been renewed scholarly interest in the concept of citizenship in an
interdisciplinary effort of political scientists and historians, anthropologists and sociolo-
gists.1 Challenged by socio-political developments of the post-Communist and
post-Maastricht era, numerous scholars have re-examined established notions of citizen-
ship and civil society and tried to adapt them to new historical circumstances.
Nevertheless, as Brian Turner has pointed out, while the growing body of scholarly
works on citizenship has concentrated overwhelmingly on theoretical aspects, the history
of the institution of citizenship in Western Europe—and, this author would add,
especially in Eastern Europe—have remained largely under-researched.2
This article attempts to contribute historical data to studies of the emergence and
development of the institution of citizenship in Romania between 1866 and 1918 by
connecting the subject matter of citizenship with issues of state formation, the construc-
tion of national identity and the structuring of the private and public spheres. The
primary question of the article is: did citizenship legislation in Romania function as a
mechanism of socio-political emancipation and national integration of marginal gender
and ethno-religious groups in the given period? In investigating this question, the
analysis highlights the contradiction between the claim for universality of the bourgeois-
democratic ideology and the hierarchic and illiberal citizenship practice which
disenfranchised a considerable number of men, denied women substantive civic and
political rights and excluded from state citizenship signi cant ethnic and religious
1. From the abundan t recent scholarly production on citizenship, I mention selectively works by: Michael Mann,
‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’ in Sociology, 21 (1987) 3, pp. 339–54; Will Kymlicka, Multicultural
Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, New York, 1989; Rogers W. Brubaker , Citizenship and
Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, 1992; Reinhard Bendix, Nation Building and Citizenship. Studies
of Our Changing Social Order, New Brunswick, 1996; and Charles Tilly, ed., Citizenship, Identity and Social
History, Cambridge, 1996. See also collections of articles in Bryan S. Turner and Peter Hamilton, eds, Citizenship.
Critical Concepts, London, 1994, Vols I–II; and in Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorising Citizenship, New York, 1995.
2. Turner, ‘Outline of a Theory of Citizenship’ in Sociology, 24 (1990) 2, pp. 189–217.
ISSN 1350-748 6 print/ISSN 1469-8293 online/01/020157-3 0 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1350748002003347 3
158 Constantin Iordachi
minorities. Special attention is therefore devoted to the legal status of these categories
of ‘non-citizens,’ to their strategies of emancipation and their relationship with the
Romanian national ideology3.
The article is composed of six parts. The rst explores the main characteristics of the
Romanian ius sanguinis citizenship legislation and their relation to the process of nation
and state building. From a neo-Weberian theoretical perspective, it is argued that Liberal
political elites in Romania utilised citizenship as an ef cient instrument of ‘social
closure’ in order to foster national integration, to control social change and to reduce
competition for resources from concurrent economic elites. The following sub-sections
explore the Romanian citizenship doctrine ‘at work,’ by concentrating on three major
case-studies. The second part discusses the relationship between immigration, economic
competition and the legal status of Jewish ‘denizens’. The third part analyses the impact
of citizenship legislation on the assimilation of the former Ottoman province of Northern
Dobrogea into Romania (1878–1913). The fourth part attempts to introduce gender as an
analytical category into the study of the Romanian citizenship legislation by highlighting
the subordinate civic and political status of women. The fth part of the article explores
the impact of World War I on the status of minorities in Romania, in an attempt to offer
a key to understanding some salient characteristics of political developments in interwar
Greater Romania. The last part of the article reviews the main features of the Romanian
citizenship legislation, and—on the basis of this case study—it derives more general
theoretical conclusions for the study of citizenship.
1. Citizenship, Nation and State-Building in Romania, 1866–1918

1.1 Citizenship and ‘Social Closure’
Most scholarly analyses of nation-states and nationalism focus rather unilaterally on
community solidarity in terms of language and common descent, an approach which
neglects the fact that ethnic groups also constitute interest groups. In contrast, Max
Weber’s sociology of group formation considers ethnicity as essentially a political
phenomenon, produced during an intensive competition for livelihood.4 The most
elaborate form of organisation of an ethnic community as a ‘corporate interest group’ is
the nation-state, based as Rogers Brubaker pointed out on the claim that ‘the state [is]
“of” and “for” a particular, distinctive, bounded nation.’5 Weber’s framework highlights
the way in which the state uses citizenship as an effective instrument of social closure
by establishing ‘a legal order that limits competition through formal monopolies, and
transforming the body of citizens into a ‘legally privileged group’ on the basis of
legislative rules which can take the form of a written Constitution.6 As a typically closed
social relationship, citizenship has an underlying inclusion/exclusion dimension, and this
makes our world one of ‘bounded and exclusive citizenries.’7 Building on Weber’s
conceptualisation of open/closed social relationships, Rogers Brubaker identi ed the
following major forms of closure embedded in citizenship status: ‘territorial closure’,
3. On the emergence and main features of the Romanian national ideology, see the seminal work of Katherine
Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism. Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania, Berkeley,
CA, 1991, mainly pp. 8–12 and 27–63. In analysing the Romanian national ideology, Verdery focused on the
‘discursive struggles in which the concept of “the nation” or “the Romanian people” has formed a central
preoccupation ’ (p. 9).
4. Weber, Economy and Society, Berkeley, 1978, Vol. I, pp. 341–2.
5. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, 1992, p. 48.
6. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. I, p. 343.
7. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, p. 5.
Boundaries of Citizenship 159
regulated at the inter-state level and ‘domestic closure,’ which is an internal affair of the
state.8 Territorial closure relates mainly to border jurisdiction. Domestic closure, how-
ever, consists of multiple variables. These range from the ‘routine’ or ‘taken for granted’
closure of electoral participation, conscription and naturalisation, to more speci c state
policies regulating security, political, or even material interests of diverse socio-political
groups. On this basis, Brubaker concluded, ‘citizenship is thus both an instrument and
an object of closure.’9
Romanian citizenship legislation quali es as an example of a closed-type social
relationship. Modelled on the 1831 Belgian Constitution, the 1866 Constitution of
Romania implemented a modern concept of citizenship, by emulating the Western
ideological model of the nation-state, with its liberal, secularised and egalitarian features.
The 1866 Constitution exhibited, however, what Jürgen Habermas named—in his
in uential analysis of the emergence and development of the bourgeois public sphere—
the ‘ambivalence’ of the bourgeois-democratic ideology.10 In theory, the 1866
Constitution was formally committed to a universalistic de nition of citizenship, that
pledged economic and socio-political emancipation of marginal social categories. To this
end, the Constitution established a liberal political regime that guaranteed civic rights
and liberties, and—as such—compared favourably with other political systems in
East-Central Europe.11 In practice, however, instead of a uni ed and universal-egalitarian
citizenship status, the Constitution implemented a hierarchical and multi-layered citizen-
ship. First, membership in the political community was reserved for ethnic Romanians,
who had exclusive access to land tenure, bureaucratic positions and political partici-
pation. Second, the system of parliamentary representation was highly restrictive and
divided the electorate into active and passive citizens. Finally, at the margins of the
society there were the heterogeneous categories of the excluded ‘others,’ such as
peasants, women, Roma, non-Christian inhabitants (mainly Jews), and starting with
1878, the inhabitants of the newly annexed Ottoman province of Dobrogea. These
groups were denied signi cant economic, civic or political rights. The following sections
explore the main feature of the Romanian citizenship legislation at the following levels:
citizenship as political participation (Staatsbürgerschaft), and citizenship as state mem-
bership (Staatsangehörigkeit).
1.2 Being a Citizen in Romania: Rights and Duties of Citizenship

Romanian national citizenship was established in the period 1859–61 through the
political union between the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia and the process of
legal and administrative uni cation of the two countries that resulted in a common
capital, government, and legislative body. Although the process of state uni cation
enjoyed the consensus of a large part of political elites in both principalities, in regard
to the speci c path of development to be followed by the new state there were,
8. See the chapter ‘Citizenship as Social Closure’ in Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, pp. 21–34.
9. Brubaker, ‘Citizenship as Social Closure’, p. 23.
10. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeoi s
Society, Cambridge MA, 1989, p. 55.
11. The view of the Romanian historiography of Romania’s political system between 1866 and 1918 had
changed considerably during the time. Before 1989, of cial Communist historiography regarded the political
system that functioned in the period 1866–1918 as a retrograde oligarchic coalition between great landowners
and bourgeoisie. In contrast, recent historical works regard the political regime established by the 1866
Constitution as essentially a democratic political experience, and invoke the historical legacy of the 1866–1918
period as a potential basis for rebuilding democracy in Romania. See Apostol Stan, Putere politicaÏ şi democraţie
ˆõ n România, 1859–1918, Bucharest, 1995.
nevertheless, signi cant ideological differences among various political fractions. The
main cleavage was between a modernising political leadership, recruited mainly from
liberal boyars, members of the intelligentsia and urban middle strata of the population,
and traditional conservative political elites, represented mainly by great landowners. 12
In uenced primarily by French Romantic political thinkers such as Jules Michelet,
Robert de Lamennais, and Edgar Quinet, Romanian Liberal politicians—gathered around
the Wallachian leaders I. C. BraÏ tianu and C. A. Rosetti—promoted a comprehensive
program of social and political reforms.13 In contrast, Conservative politicians opposed
the radical socio-political changes envisioned by the Liberals, and favoured the mainte-
nance of the political status-quo through limited evolutionary reforms ‘from above.’14
During the rule of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza (1859–66), the political rivalry between
these two dominant factions of the Romanian political establishment was largely
repressed. Unable to gain unconditional support from either the Conservative or the
Liberal fractions, Cuza based his political legitimacy on a fragile political grouping of
moderate liberals. Since this support could not secure him suf cient political authority,
in 1864 Cuza stayed a coup d’état that suppressed political opposition and conferred him
the necessary means for implementing a comprehensive program of national and social
reforms. 15 Nevertheless, Cuza’s forced abdication in February 1866 unleashed the
political rivalry between Liberals and Conservatives, which came to dominate Romania’s
political life.
In the rst phase that started in April, political debates between Liberals and
Conservatives concentrated on the adoption of a new constitution, seen by both factions
as the cornerstone of the future political organisation of the country. After fervent
political bargaining, the nal text of the 1866 Constitution was shaped by a political
compromise between the two leading political groupings. On the one hand, the Con-
servative majority of the 1866 Constitutional Assembly accepted a Liberal Constitutional
draft composed by the Wallachian political leader C. A. Rosetti as the basis of
constitutional debates. The nal text of the 1866 Constitution endorsed many features of
the Liberal project. The Constitution established a constitutional monarchy with a
parliamentary political regime and provided for the separation of powers among the
bi-cameral Parliament and the Prince as the legislative power (art. 33 and 113), the
government and the Prince as the executive power (art. 35), and an independent system
12. Surely, social distinctions between liberals and conservatives were not so clear-cut, political af liation being
a function of many social variables, such as, among others, personal interests, ideological convictions, and speci c
political contexts. As Andrew Janos pointed out in his statistical research on Romanian political elites in the period
1866–1918, numerous great landowners adhered to the Liberal Party, while conservative politicians often engaged
in trade and manufacturing industry. See Janos, ‘Modernization and Decay in Historical Perspective’ in Kenneth
Jowitt, ed., Social Change in Romania 1860–1940: A Debate on Development in a European Nation, Berkeley,
1978, pp. 70–116.
13. On the history of liberalism in Romania, see Apostol Stan & Mircea Iosa, Liberalismul politic õˆn România:
De la origini pânaÏ la 1918, Bucharest, 1996; Gheorghe Cliveti, Liberalismul românesc: eseu istoriogra c, Iasi,
1996; and Dan A. LaÏ zaÏ rescu, Introducere ˆõ n istoria liberalismului european şi ˆõ n istoria Partidului
Naţional-Liberal din România, Bucharest, 1996.
14. On the history of conservatism in Romania, see Anastasie Iordache, Originile şi constituirea Partidului
Conservator din România, Bucharest 1999; and Ion Bulei, Sistemul politic al României moderne. Partidul
conservator, Bucharest, 1987.
15. For a comprehenive analysis of Romanian political life between 1859–71, see Paul E. Michelson, Romanian
Politics, 1859–1871: from Prince Cuza to Prince Carol, Iaşi, 1998; and Anastasie Iordache, Instituirea monarhiei
constituţionale şi regimul parlamentar ˆõ n România, 1866–1871, Bucharest, 1997. For the next period, see
Anastasie Iordache, Sub zodia Strousberg: Viaţa politicaÏ din România ˆõ ntre 1871–1878, Bucharest, 1991; Lothar
Maier, Rumänien auf den Weg zur Unabhängigkeitserkl ärung 1866–1877, München, 1989; and Traian Lungu,
Viaţa politicaÏ ˆõ n România, 1899–1910, Bucharest, 1977. For syntheses on Romania’s history, see Keith Hitchins,
Rumania, 1866–1947, Oxford, 1994; and The Romanians, 1774–1866, Oxford, 1996.
of courts as the judicial power (art. 36 and 104).16 It also guaranteed fundamental rights
and liberties, such as the sovereignty of the people, representative government, freedom
of the press, freedom of association and conscience, and the right to state-sponsored
education; private property was declared sacred and inviolable (see art. 5, 21, 23, 24, 26,
and 31). On this basis, the Constitution provided for the functioning of a multi-party
system based on adult male suffrage with a secret ballot.
On the other hand, while endorsing substantive civic liberties, the Conservative
parliamentary majority nevertheless imposed an inegalitarian and highly restrictive
electoral system. Thus, the Constitution granted political rights only to propertied and
educated adult males, a feature that excluded the great majority of the population from
political participation. Even by 1911, in spite of a gradual opening up of the electoral
system, there were only 1,077,863 male voters in Romania out of a total population of
about 6,900,000 inhabitants.17 In addition, the electoral system divided the electorate into
direct and indirect voters and grouped them according to their socio-professional
category. As a result, territorial constituencies for the Chamber of Deputies—the lower
house of the Romanian Parliament—were divided into four colleges which assured the
dominant representation of great and middle landowners (Colleges I and II, representing
1.5% of the total voters, but electing 41% of the deputies), and of the urban middle class
and professional categories (College III, representing 3.5% of the voters, but electing
38% of the deputies). At the same time, the remaining 95% of the electorate were
con ned to a single college (IV) which elected only 21% of the deputies; within it, the
illiterate voters without a standard level of income (91% of the electorate) elected only
an electoral ‘delegate’ for every 50 voters. These delegates exercised a direct vote in a
second ballot, on behalf of the indirect voters.18 The electorate for the Senate was even
more limited, consisting of only 2% of the voting body: the great landowners and high
professional categories. The system of parliamentary representation in Romania was thus
based on an underlying electoral inequality. According to of cial statistics, in 1901, a
majority of voters—93.5% of the electoral body, or 839,305 persons—disposed of only
one indirect vote, and elected about 20% of deputies. At the same time, the remaining
part of the voters—representing 6.5% of the electoral body or 89,201 persons—elected,
through a direct ballot, about 80% of the deputies. Within the latter category of direct
voters, a small elite of 1.7% of the electorate, or 23,632 persons, disposed of two
in uential votes (one for the Senate and one for the Chamber of Deputies), and elected
over 50% of deputies.19
The exclusion of the majority of citizens from substantive political participation had
important consequences for the evolution of the Romanian political system, undermining
the development of a liberal political culture, the consolidation of free civic institutions
16. In the period 1866–78, Romania was still formally under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. Therefore,
Carol I of Hohenzollern-Siegmaringe n held the title of Prince. It was only in 1881, after the achievemen t of
Romania’s state independenc e following the 1877–78 Russian-Turkish War and the proclamation of the Kingdom,
that Carol I took of cially the title of King.
17. Leonida Colescu, Statistica electoralaÏ . Alegerile general e pentru Corpurile Legiuitoare ˆõ n 1907 şi 1911,
Bucharest, 1913, pp. 11–13.
18. I am relying here on data provided by Philip G. Eidelberg, The Great Rumanian Peasant Revolt of 1907.
Origins of a Modern Jacquerie, Leiden, 1974, pp. 15–16. For additional data, see also Paraschiva Cancea, Mircea
Iosa and Apostol Stan, eds, Istoria parlamentulu i şi a vieţii parlamentare din România põˆnaÏ la 1918, Bucharest,
1983, pp. 252–55.
19. Colescu, Statistica electorala. Alegerile general e pentru corpurile legivitoare in anii 1901 si 1905,
Bucharest, 1905, p. 7.
and the emergence of modern political parties.20 In the lack of genuine electoral
competitions, the leading political factions of Liberals and Conservatives had to resort
to political clientelism, momentary political alliances, and regular legislative ‘adjust-
ments’ of the electoral system in order to dominate the political life of the country.
Generally, the electoral support of the Conservatives was more homogeneous and stable,
being based on the dominant economic basis and electoral power of great landowners;
in 1905, landowners represented, according to electoral statistics, 40% of the electoral
body and elected 45% of the deputies. In order to match the electoral in uence of the
Conservatives, Liberals pleaded that the Constitution conferred political rights to ‘the
middle class’—such as the urban middle classes, various strata of the intelligentsia, and
state functionaries—de ned in the Liberal discourse as ‘the basis of the constitutional
regime.’21 Since many of these categories could not reach the minimal standard of
income quali cation set by the electoral system, the Liberals lobbied that the Consti-
tution guaranteed voting rights to professors, priests, persons engaged in the liberal
professions, and retired state bureaucrats, irrespective of their incomes.
Despite the over-representation of the middle class, the Liberal Party was nevertheless
compelled to rely primarily on the bureaucratic apparatus in order to dominate political
life. This policy was favoured by a speci c feature of the Romanian political system: in
case of political crisis, the Prince, as the representative of the executive power, could,
at any time, dissolve the Parliament and appoint a new government for organising
parliamentary elections. Through effective administrative pressure exercised over the
electorate by prefects and subprefects at local level, the new governmental party was
always able to win the majority in national elections, which varied between 51% and
97% during the period from 1866 to 1914.22 Always making use of a comfortable
parliamentary majority, the government was thus able to exert genuine control over the
legislative power so that according to one deputy, in Parliament ‘we do not deliberate,
we just follow the government.’23 The result was a de facto pre-eminence of the
executive apparatus over elected institutions. According to the deputy Becescu-Silvan
‘this subordination of the national will to the government is due to our Constitution, so
unequal in its fundamental principles …. The executive power, through the Prince, can,
always dissolve one or both Chambers of the Parliament.’24 This practice shifted the
source of political power from leverage over public opinion to control over bureaucracy.
The state administration acquired an important role in the political life of the country,
and the Ministry of the Interior became the most in uential governmental position. The
political scene thus became a back-stage competition between successive Conservative
and Liberal administrations, ‘the Sodom and Gomorrah of Romanian politics.’25 This
feature of the political system contributed ultimately to the expansion of the bureaucratic
machinery; in 1871, the Conservative politician Titu Maiorescu estimated the number of
20. Romanian political factions evolved at a late stage as permanent and fully structured territorial
organizations. The Liberal Party was created in 1875 and the conservative Party in 1881. For a comprehensiv e
discussion of the Romanian political system, see Paul E. Michelson, mostly the chapter ‘The Hohenzollern s Come
to Romania, 1866–1867’, in Romanian Politics, 1859–1871.
21. Deputy Nicolae Ionescu, quoted in Alexandru Pencovici, Dezbaterile AdunaÏ rii constituţionale din anul
1866 asupra constituţiei şi legei electorale, Bucharest, 1883, p. 23.
22. Janos, ‘Modernization and Decay’, p. 87; and Eidelberg, The Great Rumanian Peasant Revolt, p. 18. This
characteristic of the Romanian political system—which remained dominant for the interwar period as well—was
suggestively expressed by the Conservative politician P. P. Carp: ‘Give me the government and I will deliver you
the Parliament.’
23. Deputy Nicolae Enãşescu, quoted in Istoria parlamentulu i, p. 460.
24. Istoria parlamentului, p. 459.
25. Metaphor coined by Nicolae Iorga in Neamul Românesc, 25 June 1906: ‘Now Sodom is out of power; but
when Gomorrah governs again…’
bureaucrats at 64,000 and their salaries at one third of Romania’s annual budget.26
The direct bene ciaries of this bureaucratic expansion were the pauperised categories
of lower boyars, who saw entry to bureaucratic positions as a viable sustenance
alternative to economic initiative and therefore instituted a virtual monopoly over
accession into Romanian bureaucracy27. Andrew Janos has pointed out that between
1866 and 1878, middle and lower boyars held approximately 77% of all cabinet posts.28
Recruitment into bureaucracy was gradually liberalised only after 1878, when the
achievement of Romania’s state independence stimulated a further expansion of the
bureaucratic apparatus. Between 1895 and 1915, non-boyar professional elements
accounted for 51% of the cabinet seats, 59.5% of parliamentary seats and over 80% of
the higher bureaucracy.29 Through an effective alliance with this in uential social
category, the Liberal Party succeeded in dominating the political life of the country and
in shaping the evolution of the political system; socio-political reforms ‘from above’
undermined the economic ef ciency of great estates and promoted a projectionist
program of sheltered industrialisation.30 The result was the emergence of a bureaucratic
nationalism, in which Romanian socio-political elites used citizenship legislation as an
effective tool for stimulating economic development, appropriating state resources, and
curbing competition from concurrent economic elites.31 These underlying characteristics
of citizenship legislation in Romania also shaped the stipulations regarding the accession
to Romanian state-citizenship.
1.3 Romanian State-Citizenship as a Privilege of Ethnic Romanians

Pertaining to citizenship as state-membership (Staatsangehörigkeit), Romanian citizen-
ship doctrine was initially balanced between a political and an ethno-cultural de nition
of nationhood. Thus, the 1864 Romanian Civil Code, passed under the rule of Prince
Cuza, adopted the ius sanguinis principle, by automatically ascribing Romanian citizen-
ship to a child born of the marriage of a Romanian man.32 Nevertheless, under the direct
in uence of the 1804 Napoleonic Code, the Romanian Code included also a strong ius
solis component. According to article 8, ‘Any individual born and raised in Romania
until adulthood can claim Romanian citizenship in a year’s time after reaching maturity,
providing that he has never been subject of a foreign state.’ Most importantly, the Code
admitted also for the naturalisation of non-Christian inhabitants, providing that they lived
in Romania for at least ten years, and that their requests for naturalisation reached the
approval of the Prince and of the Parliament (art. 16).
During the parliamentary debates on the 1866 Constitution, this inclusive citizenship
legislation was challenged by an ethno-cultural understanding of nationhood. Ultimately,
the nal text of the Constitution implemented an illiberal turn, by reversing many
stipulations of the 1865 Civil Code. The Constitution abolished the ius solis component
of the citizenship legislation, by abrogating articles 8, 9 and 16 of the Civil Code and
26. See Titu Maiorescu, InsemnaÏ ri zilnice, Bucharest, 1937, Vol. I, p. 175.
27. See Janos, ‘Modernization and Decay,’ p. 89.
28. Janos, ‘Modernization and Decay’, p. 89.
29. Janos, ‘Modernization and Decay’, p. 89.
30. For a comprehensiv e account of the evolution of Romania’s socio-political system in this period, see Gale
Stokes, ‘The Social Origins of East European Politics’ in Daniel Chirot, ed., The Origins of Backwardnes s in
Eastern Europe, Berkeley, 1989, pp. 210–52.
31. On the concept of Eastern European bureaucratic nationalism, see Peter F. Sugar, ‘External and Domestic
Roots of Eastern European Nationalism’ in Peter F. Sugar & Ivo Lederer, eds, Nationalism in Eastern Europe,
Seattle, 1969, pp. 46, 50–52.
32. Constantin Hamangiu, Codul Civil Adnotat, Bucharest, 1899, Vol. I, art. 6–20, pp. 60–82.
denying the access of non-Christian foreigners to Romanian citizenship. Article 7 of the

Constitution stipulated that ‘Only foreigners of Christian rite can acquire naturalis-
ation’(art. 7). In addition, the Constitution reinforced the ius sanguinis component of the
citizenship legislation. Article 3 of the Constitution stipulated that ‘Romanian territory
cannot be colonised with foreign population,’ while article 9 read that ‘an [ethnic]
Romanian from any state, regardless of his place of birth, upon renouncing his foreign
subjection, can immediately acquire political rights, through a vote of the Parliament.’33
The latter stipulation expressed the incomplete ethnic boundaries of the Romanian
nation-state and legitimised an irredentist policy directed towards absorbing ethnic
Romanians from Austro-Hungary , the Tsarist Empire and the Balkans. From 1866, the
principle of ius sanguinis thus served as an exclusive basis for ascribing Romanian
citizenship. In addition, ethnic Romanians from neighbouring countries (români de
originaÏ ), had instant access to Romanian citizenship without being subject to a natural-
isation stage. By contrast—in a dissimilationist spirit—the ius solis component of the
citizenship legislation was virtually absent; birth and uninterrupted residence in Roma-
nian territory alone did not have any bearing on ascribing Romanian citizenship. The
only exception admitted were the abandoned new-born babies, who, since found on the
Romanian territory, were assumed as having Romanian parents and ascribed Romanian
citizenship. The Romanian citizenship legislation thus departed from the French assimi-
lationist citizenship model which supplemented the ius sanguinis principle with a strong
ius solis component and exhibited strong resemblance to the German and Russian
examples of ‘pure’ ius sanguinis citizenship legislation.
The adoption of the ius sanguinis principle in ascribing Romanian citizenship had
important practical consequences for the system of legal evidence of citizenship, for the
accession to Romanian citizenship of ethnic Romanians who immigrated from neigh-
bouring countries, and for the legal status of ethnic minorities in Romania. First, in cases
under juridical contention, the system of the legal evidence required for Romanian
citizenship was very complex, especially for the period before 1878, when state
administration was less developed and identity papers were generally missing. If an
individual could not provide a written evidence that he was born of the marriage of a
Romanian man, he was compelled to supply instead a wide range of oral testimonies and
written documents in order to prove his Romanian citizenship, including evidence that
he paid taxes, exercised political rights, and performed military service.34 The system of
legal evidence was even more problematic in the case of ethnic Romanians from
neighbouring countries immigrating to Romania. How could one prove that one is an
ethnic Romanian? Romanian legislation required that, in order to qualify for naturalis-
ation under art. 9 of the Constitution, an ethnic Romanian from abroad had to provide
certi cates of nationality issued by the Ottoman, Russian, or Austro-Hungarian authori-
ties. Nevertheless, since in practice many immigrants were generally missing identity
papers, Romanian authorities had to take into account other ‘markers’ of ethnicity, such
as knowledge of the Romanian language, or the practice of the Eastern Orthodox
religion. The legislation regarding ethnic Romanian immigrants was further complicated
by an additional—and more substantial—legal controversy. The 1866 Constitution
employed the term ‘Romanians’ (români) with two radically different meanings in order
to designate both Romanian citizens (art. 7) and ethnic Romanians from neighbouring
countries (see art. 9, alternatively named români de originaÏ ). This major terminological
aw generated an acute controversy in regard to the legal status of ethnic Romanians
33. ‘Constituţia din 1866’ in Ion Muraru & Gheorghe Iancu, eds, Constituţiile Române, Bucharest, 1995, p. 32.
Translations from the original text are mine.
34. For details, see Barbu Berceanu, CetaÏ ţenia: monogra e juridicaÏ , Bucharest, 1999, pp. 200–1.
from abroad. According to some juridical interpretations, ethnic Romanians from

neighbouring countries were foreigners who needed naturalisation in Romania. In
contrast, other interpretations of the Constitution asserted that, by virtue of their ethnic
origin, ethnic Romanians living abroad were an integral part of the Romanian national
community, and were therefore automatically entitled to a formal ‘recognition’ of their
Romanian citizenship by the Parliament.
The absence of an ius solis component in ascribing Romanian citizenship coupled with
the exclusion of non-Christian inhabitants from naturalisation resulted in a signi cant
numerical difference between the overall permanent resident population of the country
and the more limited category of full citizens. In 1876, out of a total population of
4,800,000, there were approximately 700,000 non-citizen residents, representing 14% of
the inhabitants.35 This difference was further aggravated toward the end of the century
when Romania’s resident alien population grew on average by approximately 20,000
immigrants a year, or four to ve persons to every 1,000.36 As a result, according to
of cial statistics, in 1899 Romania had, after Switzerland, the second greatest ratio of
non-citizen residents in Europe, with seventy-nine ‘foreigners’ to every 1,000 inhabitants
representing 467,394 inhabitants.37 The legal status of these non-citizen residents was
very ambiguous, and generated numerous political controversies. Analysing the hetero-
geneous legal status of Romania’s inhabitants, Leonida Colescu, the head of the
Romanian Service of General Statistics, acknowledged that the concept of citizenship
‘cannot be applied in its strict scienti c meaning to the various legal groupings that
compose the inhabitants of the Kingdom.’38 Colescu identi ed two distinct categories of
non-citizen residents in Romanian territory: foreign citizens who resided temporarily or
permanently in Romania and ‘foreigners who immigrated in Romania’ and ‘lost their
original citizenship without becoming Romanian citizens either.’39 Consequently, this
latter category of residents had an intermediary legal status between full citizens and
aliens. In Colescu’s words, ‘they live under the protection of the Romanian state, and
enjoy full civic rights as all the other inhabitants, but are denied the exercise of political
rights of Romanian citizenship.’40 According to the of cial census, in 1899, these
permanent non-citizen residents in Romania amounted to 278,560 individuals, or 47.3%
persons to every 1,000 inhabitants.41 They were represented mainly by ‘Jews from
Galicia and Russia, as well as by other nationalities such as Bulgarians, Austro-
Hungarians, Poles, and Russians.’42 Romanian legislation had great dif culties in
labelling this category of non-citizen residents; at times, the legislation employed various
legal formulas, such as ‘Romanian subjects’ (supuşi români), ‘inhabitants of the country’
(locuitori ai ţaÏ rii) or ‘foreigners who are not subjects of a foreign power’ (straÏ ini
nesupuşi unei puteri straÏ ine).
35. Data on the total Romanian population in the second half of the nineteenth century are usually arbitrary
since comprehensiv e general demographi c surveys were conducted only in 1859–60 and 1899. For estimates on
non-citizen residents, I used here M. G. Obedenaru, La Roumanie économique d’après les données les plus
récentes, Paris, 1876, p. 402.
36. Ibid. For the entire period between 1859 and 1899, Colescu estimates the number of immigrants in Romania
at 329,560 persons, or an annual average of 8,239. See Colescu, Analiza rezultatelor recensaÏ mântului general
al populaţiei României din 1899, Bucharest, 1944, pp. 29–31. For useful data on immigration in Romania, see
also Ion Ghica, ‘Industria’ in ÎnsemnaÏ ri economice, Vol. I, Bucharest, 1937; and Dan Berindei, Societatea
româneascaÏ ˆõ n vremea lui Carol I (1866–1876), Bucharest, 1992, pp. 72–82.
37. Colescu, Analiza rezultatelor recensaÏ mõˆntului, pp. 90–92, and 95.
38. Colescu, Analiza rezultatelor recensaÏ mõˆntului, p. 91.
How can one account for the massive exclusion of non-Romanian residents from
citizenship? A possible theoretical explanation may be provided by Max Weber’s
sociology of group formation. As Weber pointed out, a social relationship may be closed
in order to increase ‘the opportunity of satisfying many diverse interests, whether the
satisfaction be spiritual or material.’43 Therefore, if participants ‘are interested in
improving their position through monopolistic practices they will tend to favour a closed
relationship.’ 44 In regard to citizenship, Weber’s theoretical conclusion was best sup-
ported by Rogers Brubaker, who, in his authoritative comparative analysis of citizenship
in France and Germany, pointed out that the exclusion of permanent residents from
citizenship can be generally caused by the political utilisation of citizenship as an
instrument of ‘domestic closure’ for satisfying material interests.45 The Romanian
citizenship legislation carried out this closure in two major ways. First, the 1866
Constitution was based on the commonly accepted principle that excludes foreigners
from the exercise of political rights (art. 6).46 In Romania political rights accounted for
an extensive range of privileges. Thus land tenure—the main source of social status and
income—was considered a political right and regulated by citizenship legislation: ‘Only
Romanians and those who have become naturalised Romanians can acquire rural
properties in Romania’ (art. 7/V). Moreover, only Romanians were eligible for positions
in the state bureaucratic apparatus (art. 10). Secondly, Romanian political elites went
beyond this ‘routine’ closure of political rights, and, through speci c state policies,
established a direct relationship between citizenship and the exercise of certain civil
rights and economic activities. In so doing, the state acted concomitantly as a member-
ship and territorial organisation; while participation in the political community was
reserved for ethnic Romanians, the state nevertheless exercised territorial authority over
the entire resident population. To this end, Romanian legislation de ned de facto two
types of naturalisation: a ‘narrow naturalisation’, which granted residence rights, trans-
forming all permanent inhabitants of the country into virtual Romanian subjects and a
‘broad naturalisation’ which conferred full political rights.47 This distinction offered the
state an effective instrument for extracting duties from residents, while denying them the
bene ts of citizenship.
The laws concerning military draft are a relevant example. The classical republican
de nition of citizenship associated military conscription with citizen status; in modern
France, the need for soldiers in waging modern wars was one of the salient reasons for
assimilating second-generation immigrants into full citizens.48 Signi cantly, Romanian
legislation departed from the French example. Although successive conscription laws
from 1876 and 1882 stipulated the obligation for military draft of all foreigners
in the Romanian territory ‘who are not subjects to a foreign country,’ and, respectively,
of all ‘inhabitants of the country,’ the conscription of non-citizen residents had no
bearing on their legal status, except for cases of participation in major military con icts.

45. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, p. 32.
46. Far from being specific to the Romanian legislation, the exclusion of non-citizens from political rights is
in fact the most salient universal characteristic of nation-state citizenship. As Brubaker pointed out, this is an
underlying feature of ‘the routine, ordinary, taken-for-granted nationalism.’ Brubaker, Citizenship and
Nationhood , p. 28.
47. This distinction was introduced in the naturalization practice of the Principalities in 1831 by ‘The Organic
Regulations,’ the rst constitutions of Wallachia and Moldovia, adopted under Russian occupation (1829–1934).
48. This collective naturalization was admitted on the basis of a special 1879 amendmen t to the Constitution:
‘Those who served in the army during the War of Independenc e can be naturalized collectively, through a single
law and without any other formality’ (Art. 7, paragraph II, point c).
In 1879, 883 Jewish soldiers were granted citizenship for ghting in the Romanian army
in the War of Independence (1877–78)49. Jewish soldiers participating in Romania’s
military campaign in Bulgaria during the Second Balkan War (1913) had to wait,
nevertheless, until 1918 to be granted citizenship. Furthermore, the possibility of upward
social mobility provided by the army were speci cally denied to non-citizen soldiers;
laws of 1875 and 1911 forbade their accession to the rank of of cer.
In summary, Romanian citizenship legislation served as an effective instrument of
social closure. According to the principle of ius sanguinis, political rights were reserved
to ethnic Romanians who had exclusive access to land tenure, bureaucratic positions and
political participation. At the same time, the absence of a ius solis component in ascribing
citizenship degraded a substantial part of the resident population to the legally inferior
status of Romanian subjects, which encompassed their obligation for taxation and military
service, but denied their exercise of political rights and of certain economic activities. In
addition, the highly bureaucratised procedure of naturalisation reserved to the bureauc-
racy full control over access to citizenship, a situation that favoured abuses and
corruption. These underlying features of Romanian citizenship doctrine had a powerful
impact on shaping the citizenship status of the legally subordinated categories of Jews,
Dobrogeans, and women in the period 1866–1918. The following sections focuses on the
evolution of the legal status of these categories of ‘non-citizens,’ on their campaigns of
emancipation, and their relationship to the Romanian national ideology.50
2. From ‘Denizens’ to Unwanted Citizens: The Status of Jews in Romania

The distinction between citizens and subjects was utilised by Romanian political elites
as an ef cient tool for promoting their socio-political interests to the detriment of
non-ethnic Romanian elites. The most relevant example in this respect is the legal status
of Jews in Romania. In the period from 1866 to 1918, Jewish inhabitants were denied
access to Romanian citizenship on two major grounds: Jewish illegal immigration in
Northern Moldavia and an alleged Jewish economic dominance over the Romanian
economy.
Beginning with the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a considerable immi-
gration of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jews from the Tsarist ‘Pale of Settlements’ into
Northern Moldavia raised the proportion of Jews in Moldavia to 10.5% in 1899, as
compared to a ratio of 1.8% Jews in Wallachia and a national average of 4.5%.51 Jewish
immigration reached dramatic proportions especially in the capital of Moldavia, Iaşi,
where in 1899 Jews represented 51% of the population.52 Romanian media devoted wide
coverage to Jewish immigration in Romania, portraying it as a genuine ‘invasion’ of
49. See Carol Iancu, Emanciparea Evreilor din Romania (1913–1919), Bucharest, 1998, p. 51.
50. Due to unavoidabl e space constraints, the following analysis does not cover all marginal groups in
Romanian society. The article makes only general references to the socio-economi c and political status of peasants
in Romania, considering that, given its paramount importance and complexity, the peasant question in Romania
would deserve separate treatment. Another important problem that is not covered here is the status of Roma
population, mostly because their legal emancipation in Principalities occurred at an earlier period (1844/1845–55).
For works on peasant question in Romania, see Eidelberg, The Great Rumanian Peasant Revolt … ; Daniel Chirot,
Social change in a peripheral society: the creation of a Balkan colony, New York, 1976; and David Mitrany, The
land & the peasant in Rumania: the war and agrarian reform (1917–21), London, 1930. On the history of Roma
in Romania, see George Potra, Contribuţiuni la istoricul ţiganilor din România, Bucharest, 1939; and Viorel
Achim, Tiganii ˆõ n istoria României, Bucharest, 1998. On the recent period, see Emmanuelle Pons, Les tsiganes
en Roumanie—des citoyens à part entière?, Paris, 1995.
51. Colescu, Analiza rezultatelor recensaÏ mântului, p. 85.
52. Overall, according to of cial statistics, during 1860–99 the population of Romania grew by 50%, while
the Jewish population grew by 98.7%. See Colescu, Analiza rezultatelor recensaÏ mântului, pp. 82–82.
Northern Moldavia. In the long run, this situation generated widespread anti-Semitic
prejudices, skilfully instrumentalised by Romanian socio-political elites, who perceived
the emergence of a numerous and active Jewish bourgeoisie as the major challenge to
their economic dominance.
Deploring the inability of the Romanian administration to prevent the immigration of
Jews, Romanian socio-political elites turned to legislative tools to protect their economic
interests. As a result, the legal status of Jewish communities suffered, time and again,
numerous and radical modi cations. Initially, pre-1831 Romanian legislation favoured
the socio-political integration of Jews born in Romanian territory, denying it only to
recently immigrated Jews. In 1831, however, The Organic Regulations abolished the
privileges of indigenous Jews, considering instead the entire Jewish population as
foreigners. 53 During the period from 1859 to 1866, the modernisation of the legislation
that followed the establishment of the Romanian nation-state seemed to favour the
political emancipation of Jews. As a Prime Minister of Moldavia (1860–61) and of
Romania (1863–65), Mihail Kogãlniceanu militated for the gradual political emanci-
pation and national integration of indigenous Jews through schooling, conscription into
the Romanian army, and increased participation in ‘productive’ economic activities.54 To
this end, article 26 of the 1865 Communal Law granted political rights in local elections
to several categories of indigenous Jews. Furthermore, the 1864 Romanian Civil Code
(art. 8, 9 and 16), as well as an early draft of the 1866 Constitution (art. 7) stipulated
full political emancipation of native Jews. During the constitutional debates, however,
legislative projects on Jewish emancipation met an arduous parliamentary resistance,
especially from the part of Moldavian deputies. Their effective parliamentary lobby was
accompanied by an intense anti-Semitic media campaign that degenerated in violent
anti-Semitic riots in Bucharest. Ultimately, under the pressure of this strong anti-eman-
cipation offensive, the nal text of article 7 of the Constitution denied non-Christians
access to naturalisation. This illiberal citizenship legislation was soon supplemented with
severe anti-Jewish administrative policies. In September 1866, a governmental decision
abolished yet again the distinction between indigenous and foreign Jews, a principle that
became subsequently the cornerstone of Romania’s naturalisation policy. Consequently,
the entire resident Jewish population was excluded from citizenship, even if their
families had been born and raised in Romania for generations. Furthermore, in March
and April 1867, I. C. BraÏ tianu, as Minister of the Interior, ordered harsh administrative
measures in order to eradicate illegal immigration and to hamper the unhindered
movement of illegal residents in Romanian territory. BraÏ tianu’s directives occasioned
widespread anti-Semitic abuses by Romanian authorities, and caused unanimous and
legitimate international condemnation.
According to leading Romanian politicians such as Mihail KogaÏ lniceanu and I. C.
BraÏ tianu, the compelling reasons for this policy were economic: the exclusion of Jews
from citizenship was meant to compensate for their allegedly privileged economic
situation. First, Romanian politicians blamed the fact that numerous Jews took advantage
of the limited sovereignty of the Romanian Principalities until 1878 and acquired foreign
protection from neighbouring powers, such as the Habsburg or the Tsarist Empires, by
becoming sudiţi (subjects of ‘Great European Powers’ living in Romania). Given the
53. According to Joseph Berkowitz, in La question des Israélites en Roumanie. Étude de son histoire et des
divers problèmes de droit qu’elle soulève, Paris, 1923, the 1831 anti-Semitic legislation in Romania was adopted
under Russian in uence. The same argument was also put forward by Carol Iancu in Les Juifs en Roumanie
(1866–1919). De l’exclusion a l’emancipation, Provence, 1978.
54. See Dumitru Vitcu, ‘Emanciparea evreilor români ˆõ n gõˆndirea şi practica politicaÏ KogaÏ lnicenianaÏ ’ in Studia
et Acta Historiae Iudaeorum Romaniae, II, Bucharest, 1997, pp. 125–51.
formal incorporation of Romania within the Ottoman Empire, the status of sudiţi was
regulated, over the head of the Romanian government, by the terms of the ‘capitulations’
signed between the Ottoman Empire and the Great Powers.55 Besides diplomatic
protection, these treaties conferred to sudiţi tax privileges, conscription exemption and
total juridical immunity in their relationship with Romanian authorities. These substan-
tive advantages triggered a dramatic increase of the number of sudiţi in principalities. In
exchange for a certain nancial compensation, Russian consuls in Iaşi and Bucharest
were especially generous in granting diplomatic protection, regardless of whether the
claimants were Jewish merchants or Romanian boyars. Consequently, in 1860, in
Moldova alone there were 6,164 Jewish sudit families who practised mainly trade and
manufacturing. 56 Their irregular legal status aggravated their con ict with the Romanian
administration, which constantly attempted to abolish consular jurisdiction and to subject
sudiţi to the authority of the Romanian state. Second, Romanian political elites portrayed
an alleged Jewish dominance of signi cant sectors of the economy as being detrimental
to Romanian national interests. Their arguments were based on of cial statistics which
showed that Jews represented only 4.4% of Romania’s total population in 1899, but
accounted for 21% of the total number of merchants, 39% of commercial agents, and
possessed about 19.5% of the capital invested in large-scale industry.57 In a suggestive
but cynical account of Romania’s policy towards its Jewish inhabitants, I. C. Brãtianu,
the leader of the Liberal Party, compared Jews to a fox that sneaks into a garden through
a hole in the fence and then grows so fat that she cannot go back through the hole. He
thought that the Romanian state was thus in its own right to make sure that the fox
starves enough to make it back through the exit hole.58 To this end, between 1866 and
1918 the government issued over 200 administrative regulations that denied Jews the
right to settle in the countryside, to own rural property and to practice certain professions
and engage in certain economic activities, such as lawyer (1864 and 1884), pharmacist
and inn-keeper (1910), tobacco and spirits dealer (1873 and 1887), lottery organiser, and
so on. 59 These were to remain the privilege of either the Romanian state itself or of
Romanian nationals.
The inferior legal status of Jews shaped their social composition and in uenced their
emancipation strategies. Jewish organisations in Romania reacted against the legal
discrimination to which they were subjected and conducted a sustained campaign for
political emancipation. Their domestic political lobby met, however, with the intransi-
gence of Romanian political leaders. Therefore, Jewish associations attempted to foster
an external solution to their emancipation and to this end they appealed for political
support from in uential international Jewish organisations and politicians. The legal
status of Jews in Romania thus became a European diplomatic problem. Among the most
devoted supporters of Jewish emancipation in Romania were the Alliance israélite
universelle, the American consul in Romania, B. F. Peixotto, and Bismarck’s personal
counsellor, Baron Bleichröder. Due to their intense lobbying, article 44 of the Berlin
55. These capitulations were applied in Principalities after the Treaty of Kuciuk Kainargi (1774), when many
European powers established consulates and vice-consulate s in Moldova and Wallachia for protecting their
subjects. The consular jurisdiction was gradually abolished only after Romania achieved its state independenc e
in 1878.
56. For a comprehensive discussion of the legal and social status of sudiţi in Moldova, see Stela MaÏ ries, Supuşii
straÏ ini din Moldova õˆn perioada 1781–1862, Iaşi, 1985.
57. See G. Bogdan-DuicaÏ , Românii şi Ovreii, Bucharest, 1913, p. 223. For statistics on the industrial capital,
see Colescu, Ancheta industriala din anii 1901–1902, Bucharest, 1904, p. 126.
58. Quoted in Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, Nicolae Iorga. A Biography, Iaşi, 1998, p. 39.
59. For a comprehensive analysis of this legislation, see Berkowitz, La question des Israélites en Roumanie
and Iancu, Les Juifs en Roumanie.
Treaty (July 1878) conditioned diplomatic recognition of Romania’s independence upon

granting citizenship to non-Christian subjects. However, instead of appeasing political
resistance to Jewish emancipation, this foreign intervention escalated anti-Semitic
resentment in Romania to an unprecedented level. Without monitoring the acute and
passionate political debates surrounding ‘the Jewish question’, suf ce it to say that in
1879 the Romanian Constitution was nally amended to comply with the Berlin Treaty.
Article 7, which excluded non-Christians from citizenship was revised as follows: ‘In
Romania, the difference of religious belief and confession can prevent neither the
accession to civil and political rights, nor the exercise of these rights.’60 This was,
however, only an apparent liberalisation; instead of a collective emancipation, the
amendment offered Jews only an individual access to naturalisation. The procedure of
naturalisation was very restrictive, being granted ‘exclusively by the legislative power.’
The Parliament had to pass, with a majority of at least two-thirds of the votes, a special
law on each individual case of naturalisation (art. 8). Furthermore, for qualifying for
naturalisation, a foreigner had to ful l the following conditions:
He should address to the government his request for naturalisation, in which he
must indicate the capital he possesses, his profession, the occupation he intends
to perform, and his domicile in Romania (art. 7, paragraph a); After this request
he should live in the country for ten years, and demonstrate, through his acts,
that he is useful to the community (art. 7/b).
Signi cantly, the 1879 amendment introduced a ius solis component in the naturalisation
process by excepting from the mandatory naturalisation stage ‘those born and raised in
Romania, from parents established in the country, providing that none of them were
subject to any foreign protection’(art. 7/b). Although a signi cant step toward the legal
recognition of native Jews, the newly introduced ius solis component was in fact very
weak, since it was dependent on a strong ius sanguinis condition (‘born from parents
established in the country’), required that neither parents nor sons had been subjects of
a foreign state, (a condition that excluded sudiţi from the naturalisation process) and
because both the above-noted conditions had to be proven with legal documents. Since
in many cases such documents were never issued, many residents were in effect
disquali ed from this naturalisation exemption. Consequently, the 1879 constitutional
amendment made naturalisation extremely slow and restrictive. Far from being simple
formalities, decisions on individual cases of naturalisation were debated by Parliament
at great length and the number of favourable decisions was very limited; there were only
183 in the period from 1878 to 1911 out of an estimated many thousands of requests.61
How can the exclusion of Jews from citizenship in Romania be explained? In spite of
the prevailing economic arguments employed by Romanian politicians, anti-Semitism in
Romania was not triggered simply by economic incentives, but by a powerful combi-
nation of religious, economic, and ideological motivations. Consequently, the sociology
of anti-Semitism in Romania cannot be understood without recourse to intellectual
history. As Leon Volovici’s authoritative analysis of anti-Semitism in Romania has
pointed out, the image of the Jews in Romania was that of the ‘internal foreigner’, and
served as a central ideological ingredient in the nationalists’ campaign of political
mobilisation. 62 The negative stereotypes of Jews that had already existed at the level of
60. Muraru, Constituţiile Romaniei, p. 34.

61. Iancu, Les Juifs en Roumanie, pp. 186–7.
62. Leon Volovici, Ideologia naţionalistaÏ ˆõ n problema evreiascaÏ ˆõ n România anilor ’30, Humanitas, 1995, p. 5.
On the intellectual history of anti-Semitism in Romania, see also William Oldson, A Providential Anti-Semitism.
Nationalism and Polity in Nineteenth-Centur y Romania, Philadelphia, 1991, and Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics
in Greater Romania, 1918–1930, Ithaca, 1995.
both popular and literary culture in the eighteenth century were reinforced in the second
half of the nineteenth century by numerous Romanian writers and politicians and utilised
as ‘a catalyst for the consolidation of nationalism and as stimulus to “national awaken-
ing.” ’63 From Mihai Eminescu to Nicolae Iorga and A. C. Cuza, prominent Romanian
nationalists constructed—with signi cant nuances and variations—a symbolic axis of the
Romanian national ideology between peasants and the Jews, in which the rst were
portrayed as the symbol of traditional Romanian national values, while the latter were
perceived as cosmopolitan and disruptive social elements.64 In this way, as Volovici
asserted, ‘the Jewish question’ became not just ‘the central problem of Romanian
economic and political life,’ but also ‘a vital question of the Romanian culture.’65
As a result, until World War One, Romanian Jews remained con ned to the legally
inferior status of subjects: they lived in Romanian territory, paid taxes and performed
military service, but were denied signi cant civil and political rights. In 1912, there were
only 4,668 Jewish citizens in Romania, representing 1.9% of the country’s total Jewish
population, as compared to 228,430 Jewish subjects or 94.8% of the total, and 7,987
Jews under foreign protection, or 3.3% of the total.66 Facing the intransigent attitude of
Romanian authorities, numerous Jews chose to emigrate to the United States or Western
Europe, with the result that their ratio within the Romanian population decreased from
4.5% in 1899 to 3.3% in 1912.67
3. Citizenship and Assimilation: The Integration of Northern Dobrogea into

Romania
The second major legal category excluded from full citizenship rights in Romania in the
period 1878–1909/1912 were the inhabitants of Northern Dobrogea. The province was
granted to Romania following its participation in the 1877–78 Russian Turkish War. The
Treaty of the European Congress in Berlin (July 1878) stipulated in article 46 that
Romania would cede Southern Bessarabia to the Czarist Empire, and receive in
compensation the former Ottoman province of Northern Dobrogea.
Romanian political elites perceived the annexation of Dobrogea as a major challenge
to the Romanian ius sanguinis citizenship legislation. As a frontier zone at the
borderland of the Ottoman Empire, Dobrogea carried a speci c imperial demographic
legacy, being inhabited by about twenty-one ethnic groups, such as Turks and Tartars,
Romanians, Bulgarians, Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Germans, and Italians. The
province was also a ‘micro-cosmos of all religions.’68 Together with the predominant
Muslim Turks and Tartars, there were also Eastern Orthodox Greeks, Romanians and
Bulgarians, as well as Jews, Russian Old Believers (Lipovans), Catholics and Protes-
tants. In Romania, the existence of an overwhelming Eastern Orthodox Christian
majority, coupled with the tradition of the old treaties (‘capitulations’) completed
between the Principalities and the Ottoman Empire—which had forbidden the practice
of the Muslim religion on Romanian territory—favoured the legal association between
63. Volovici, Ideologia naţionalistaÏ , p. 8.

64. See Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, especially Part I, Chapter 5. See also Volovici, Ideologia naţionalistaÏ ,
p. 7. On the social composition of Jews in Northern Moldova, see Ecaterina Negruţi, Structura demogra caÏ a
oraşelor şi tõˆrgurilor din Moldova, 1800–1859, Iaşi, 1997. On popular anti-Semitic stereotypes in Romania, see
Andrei Oişteanu, Mythos & Logos. Studii şi eseuri de antropologi e culturalaÏ , Bucharest, 1997.
65. Volovici, Ideologia naţionalistaÏ , p. 7, and vii.
66. Iancu, Emanciparea evreilor, p. 210.
67. In real terms, given the natural demographi c growth, the number of Jews increased from 239,016 in 1899
to 269,015 in 1912. Iancu, Emanciparea evreilor, p. 37.
68. Kogãlniceanu, Opere, Bucharest, 1974, Vol. V, Part I, p. 287.
Romanian national identity and Christianity. While numerous Romanian politicians

pleaded for religious tolerance toward non-Orthodo x Christians, in the view of many
nationalists the incorporation of a large Muslim population contradicted the doctrine of
the Romanian Christian state.69 Consequently, the integration of Northern Dobrogea into
Romania was framed by an underlying dichotomy of symbolic inclusion but administrat-
ive exclusion. Despite its formal territorial incorporation into Romania, Northern
Dobrogea was subject to a ‘separate administrative organisation’ between 1878 and
1913. Under this status, the Dobrogeans enjoyed a local type of citizenship, which
denied them rights of political participation and of acquiring property outside the
province. 70
3.1 Citizenship Legislation in Northern Dobrogea

Romania took over the administration of Northern Dobrogea from Russia on 14
November 1878.71 The prospective organisation of the province occasioned passionate
polemics between Liberals and Conservatives. The ruling Liberal Party (1876–88)
pleaded for a separate administrative organisation for the province, which was to give
the government a free hand in implementing a gradual program of economic modernis-
ation and ethnic assimilation. In contrast, the Conservative opposition advocated an
immediate extension of Romania’s Constitution in the province as a guarantee against
Dobrogea’s becoming a ‘colony of the Liberals.’ Animated by the determined leadership
of Prime Minister Ion C. Brãtianu and of the Foreign Minister Mihail Kogãlniceanu, the
Liberals succeeded in imposing their vision of the future organisation of Dobrogea: the
Romanian Parliament authorised the Liberal government to administer Dobrogea through
governmental ad hoc regulations until there was a nal constitutional solution.
In order to implement their developmental strategy in the province, the Liberals
designed a three-stage mechanism composed of ethnic assimilation, economic modernis-
ation and cultural homogenisation which combined attempts at sheltered industrialisation
with a campaign for national consolidation. Built on a restraining citizenship legislation,
this mechanism facilitated the integration of Northern Dobrogea with Romania at the
following levels: the colonisation of Dobrogea with ethnic Romanians; the nationalisa-
tion of the land in the province; the cultural homogenisation of Dobrogea; the
implementation of a highly centralised political regime, which promoted the interests of
the Bucharest-based political elites and weakened regional political resistance; and,
nally, the exclusion of Dobrogea’s non-Romanian economic elites from political rights.
The following analysis focuses on two main aspects of the administrative organisation
of the province, namely citizenship and property legislation.
In March 1880, the Romanian Parliament adopted ‘the Law Concerning Dobrogea’s
Administrative Organisation,’ with the primary aim of assimilating Dobrogea with
Romania.72 Article 3 of the Law read that ‘all the inhabitants of Dobrogea, who, on April
69. Legally, this contradiction was liquidated at just one year after the annexation of Dobrogea: the revision
of article 7 of the Romanian Constitution provided for individual naturalization of non-Christians (1879).
70. For a comprehensiv e analysis of mechanisms of integration of Northern Dobrogea to Romania, see
Constantin Iordachi, Citizenship, Nation and State-building: The Integration of Northern Dobrogea into Romania,
1878–1913, Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East-European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2001, and Iordachi,
“A románok Kaliforniája”: a román határ kiterjesztése Észak-Dobrudzs ában 1878–1913, in Replika (Budapest),
pp. 41–42, November 2000, pp. 239–261.
71. During the Russian-Turkish war, Dobrogea was occupied by Russian troops. This occupation lasted from
April 1877 to November 1878.
72. Legea pentru Organizarea administrativã a Dobrogei, 2 March 1880. A complementar y regulation was
issued on 5 June 1880. See Hamangiu, Codul General, Vol. II, pp. 267–72, and 292–5.
11, 1877 were Ottoman citizens, have become Romanian citizens.’ Article 5 stipulated
that ‘the inhabitants of Dobrogea who have become Romanian citizens are equal before
the law, enjoy all the civil rights, and can be appointed in public functions, regardless
of their origin or religion,’ while article 6 extended to the inhabitants of Dobrogea
numerous civil rights provided by the Romanian Constitution. The Law also guaranteed
free state education, liberty of conscience and religious belief, and stipulated the military
recruitment of Dobrogeans into the Romanian army. Yet in spite of Dobrogea’s formal
incorporation into Romania, the 1880 Law was conceived as a ‘Dobrogean Constitution,’
and was to form the basis of a separate, exceptional administrative regime in the
province. This meant that, although nominally Romanian citizens, the Dobrogeans had
no political rights; article 4 of the 1880 Law stipulated that ‘a special law will determine
the conditions under which Dobrogeans will be able to exercise their political rights and
buy immovable property in Romania proper. Another law will stipulate their representa-
tion in the Romanian Parliament.’73 The law on the political emancipation of Dobrogeans
announced by article 4 would be in fact passed by the Romanian parliament only in
1909. Thus, in the period 1878–1909, the inhabitants of Dobrogea were granted only a
local-type of citizenship, since rstly, they were denied political representation in the
Romanian Parliament and the right to enrol in political parties. Instead, once a year, two
representatives of the province would raise issues of speci c Dobrogean interest to the
Prince. Secondly, once they crossed the Danube into Romania, Dobrogeans were treated
as virtual foreigners, being denied both political participation and the right to acquire
immovable property. In the words of the French traveller André Bellesort, the Do-
brogeans were placed in a situation ‘at least as extraordinary as the nature of their
country. … While they are Romanian citizens in Dobrogea, outside the province they are
neither Romanians nor citizens, and do not belong to any known category.’74
3.2 Ethnic Colonisation and Land Nationalisation in Northern Dobrogea, 1878–1913

According to one of its main authors, the Minister of the Interior Mihail Kogãlniceanu,
the exceptional administrative regime instituted in Dobrogea was a temporary measure
necessary in order to regulate the transfer of the Ottoman hierarchical property into full
capitalist property, prior to granting the Dobrogeans full citizenship.75 This process
occasioned massive reallocation of ownership among ethnic groups in the province, and
resulted ultimately in the naturalisation of the land by ethnic Romanians. Organised
under the close supervision of the Romanian state, the process of land naturalisation
occurred gradually in four major ways: the succession of the Romanian state to the
property rights of the Ottoman state in Dobrogea; the appropriation by the Romanian
state of parts of the land possessed by Dobrogeans; the opening up of virgin lands for
cultivation by ethnic Romanian colonists; and the distribution to Romanians of the lands
of all Dobrogeans who emigrated from the province.
In the rst phase, the 1880 Law stipulated the succession of the Romanian state to ‘all
the rights the Ottoman government had had on immobile property in Dobrogea’(art. 11).
As a result, the Romanian state gained property over the entire province, including
potential arable land of 1,000,000 hectares. Second, on 3 April 1882, ‘The Law
Concerning Immobile Property in Dobrogea’ aimed at transforming the Ottoman
conditional land property (miriè) into capitalist ownership. In order to become full
73. Codul General, p. 268.

74. André Bellessort, La Roumanie contemporain e, Paris, 1905, p. 278.
75. Monitorul o cial, No. 24, 30 January 1880, p. 552.
owners over their plots, peasants had to redeem their annual tithe previously due to the
Ottoman state, by paying, in successive instalments, nancial compensation to the
Romanian state. The value of this compensation was established at one third of the total
price of the plot.76
The second major aim of the 1882 law was Dobrogea’s colonisation, seen as an
imperative in an age when ‘economic progress depends on the number of arms
employed.’77 To this end, the 1882 Law granted the Romanian state the right to parcel
the land in plots between three and ten hectares and to sell it, under favourable
conditions, to colonists (art. 25–26). The Law functioned as a powerful instrument of
social closure, by connecting land ownership in the province with citizenship status.
According to article 2 of the Law ‘only Romanians can acquire immovable property.’
Under this generic label (Romanians), the Law distinguished several categories of
citizens: the former subjects of the Ottoman Empire—raja—who had been residing in
the province as of 11 April 1877; Romanian citizens from Romania proper (either by
birth or naturalised) who were encouraged to settle into Dobrogea. If relocated into the
province, they naturally retained their Romanian citizenship, but would de facto lose the
exercise of their political rights, due to the lack of political life in the province; and
ethnic Romanians from neighbouring countries. The 1882 Law stipulated that ‘ethnic
Romanians, who, according to article 9 of the 1866 Constitution can acquire citizenship
without naturalisation and by a simple vote of Parliament, have the same right [to
acquire property].’ The successive modi cations suffered by the 1882 Property Law in
1884, 1885, 1889, 1893, and 1910, highlighted the speci c interests of the Romanian
state in the colonisation process, namely: to assure a constant source of income for the
state budget (hence, article 45 of the 1889 Law on State Estates allowed the state ‘to
dispossess without warning, or juridical action,’ any buyer, who failed to pay two
consecutive instalments to the state78); and to implement an effective colonisation of
Dobrogea with ethnic Romanians. To this end, the state conditioned any acquisition of
land on permanent settlement in Dobrogea, thus tying colonists to their land.79 Finally,
the Romanian state established a virtual monopoly on land circulation in Dobrogea, by
supervising every land transaction in the province.80 Overall, during the period 1889–
1912, the state con scated 127,483 hectares of land from native Dobrogeans who failed
to redeem their tithe, and from colonists who did not pay their land instalments, or did
not effectively relocate into the province. In the period 1889–1914, 82,127 hectares of
the total land were redistributed to ethnic Romanian colonists in order to strengthen the
Romanian character of the province.81
Under the impact of the state-sponsored colonisation of Dobrogea, the overall
population of the province suffered a dramatic increase from approximately 100,000
inhabitants in 1878 to 261,490 in 1900, and to 368,189 inhabitants in 1912.82 Most
importantly, ethnic colonisation substantially altered the relationship between the three
major ethnic groups in the province. In 1879, Romanian statistics indicated three major
ethnic groups in Dobrogea, namely: 31,177 Romanians, 28,715 Bulgarians, and 32,033
76. See Codul, ‘Regulament,’ Art. 1–2, pp. 467–8, and 452.
77. Nicolae D. Ionescu, Dobrogea ˆõ n pragul veacului al XX-lea, Bucharest, 1904, p. 350.
78. Codul, p. 538.
79. Codul, p. 453.
80. See art. 3 of the Interpretative Law, that modi ed article 26 of the 1882 Law, in Codul, pp. 453–4.
81. Toma Ionescu, ‘Asupra proprietãţii şi colonizaÏ rii ˆõ n Dobrogea’ in Dobrogea . Cincizeci de ani de viaţaÏ
româneascaÏ , Bucharest, 1928, p. 274.
82. Ionescu, Dobrogea õˆn pragul; for 1912, Sabin Manuilã, ‘La population du Dobroudja,’ in La Dobroudja
Roumaine, Bucharest, 1938, p. 456.
Turks and Tartars in Dobrogea.83 In the next period, the Romanian population skyrock-
eted from 43,671 in 1880, to 119,562 in 1900, and to 216,425 in 1913. By contrast, the
other major ethnic groups in the province experienced great uctuations. The Bulgarian
population initially decreased from 28,715 in 1879, to 24,915 in 1880 (due mostly to
emigration in Bulgaria), and then to increase to 38,038 by 1900 and to 51,148 by 1913.
The number of Turks and Tartars, the predominant ethnic groups prior to the Romanian
annexation, increased in the rst period from 32,033 in 1879 to 48,100 in 1880 (due to
their partial repatriation after the devastating 1877–78 war), only to decrease again to
40,504 by 1900 and to slightly increase to 41,442 by 1913.84 Consequently, in only
twenty- ve years the ratio of ethnic Romanians in Northern Dobrogea grew from a
relative to an absolute majority (from 36.3% in 1880 to 52.5% in 1905 and to 56.9% in
1913). The Romanian population in Dobrogea was very heterogeneous. The province
became ‘a mosaic of ethnic Romanian races.’85 Together with autochthonous Romanians
in Dobrogea—Dicieni (24.2% of the total Romanian population in the province), several
other categories of Romanians settled in the province, such as Cojani from Wallachia
(39.5%), Moldavians (8%), Bessarabians (5.6%), Mocani from Transylvania and the
Banat (21.8%), Bukovinans (0.1%), and Vlachs from various Balkan regions such as the
Pind Mountains and the Timoc Valley (0.8%).86
These demographic changes affected land ownership in the province as well. In 1882,
Turks and Tartars were the leading land-owning ethnic group in the province, possessing
almost 50% of the 175,075 hectares of arable land in Dobrogea, followed by Romanians
and Bulgarians, both with shares of approximately 23% of the total land property.87 The
colonisation process radically altered these proportions. By 1905, cultivated land had
increased to 685,449 hectares. Signi cantly, Romanians became the dominant landown-
ers of the province, possessing a share of about 63% of the land. By contrast, the portion
possessed by Turks and Tartars decreased dramatically to only 7% of the land. The share
owned by Bulgarians, while increasing in absolute terms from 38,038 to 129,231
hectares, decreased nevertheless in proportion to about 19% of the total arable land.
Thus, by 1905 Romanians had already managed to acquire approximately two-thirds of
Dobrogea’s land.
3.3 Centralisation versus Regionalism: Strategies of Political Emancipation Employed

by Northern Dobrogeans
A central component of the exceptional administrative regime in Dobrogea was local
administration. The province laboured under a heavily centralised bureaucratic apparatus
which escaped the control of locally elected institutions but was tightly controlled from
Bucharest. Thus, according to the 1880 Law, mayors in Dobrogea were not elected—as
they were in Romania proper—but appointed by the prefect in rural communes, and by
the Ministry of the Interior in urban communes. Furthermore, unlike in Romania proper,
where members of the communal councils were elected on a very large electoral basis,
in Dobrogea local councillors were partly named by the prefect, while only some were
elected by local inhabitants, on the basis of a restrictive franchise. Finally, local
administrators had juridical immunity; the prefects, subprefects, policemen and mayors
could not be sued without prior authorisation from the Council of Ministers (art. 35). The
83. Statistica din Romania, Bucharest, 1879, p. 3.

84. All figures are from Ionescu, Dobrogea ˆõ n pragul, p. 654.
85. Dumitru Şandru, Mocanii in Dobrogea, Bucharest, 1946, p. 81.
86. Percentages derived from the gures provided for 1940 by Şandru, Mocanii in Dobrogea, p. 108.
87. V. Ciorbea and M. Stanciu, ‘Aspecte ale problemei agrare,’ in Dobrogea de la.
1880 Law thus invested the bureaucracy in Dobrogea with full control over the local
population. To make things worse, the majority of these bureaucrats were recruited from
outside Dobrogea and regarded the transfer in the remote province as a pro table but
severe administrative ostracism.88 This situation favoured corruption and abuses against
local population and colonists, especially from the part of petty functionaries, such as tax
collectors and land inspectors. The attitude of the Bucharest-dominated administration in
Dobrogea placed it in con ict with an emerging local elite, composed of great
landowners, rising urban bourgeoisie and persons engaged in liberal professions. This
new Dobrogean elite was composed in the majority of colonists, being the product of
Romanian rule. However, while bene ting from the new opportunities for economic
development, their lack of political rights prevented the colonists from making a decisive
political impact in the province. In reaction, Dobrogean elites developed a regional
discourse of resistance against centralisation and administrative colonisation called
Dobrogenism. Under the slogan ‘Dobrogea for the Dobrogeans,’ Dobrogenism aimed at
correcting the discrepancy between the prominent socio-economic role of Dobrogean
elites and their powerless political position. The main target of Dobrogenism became
thus the exceptional administrative regime in the province, which denied Dobrogeans the
rights to political participation and parliamentary representation. Gradually, this cam-
paign generated a nucleus of tenacious local leaders, such as Ioan Roman, a
Transylvanian jurist and publicist who in 1898 settled in Dobrogea. In a political
pamphlet entitled Dobrogea and the Political Rights of its Inhabitants (1905), Ioan
Roman constructed a fully articulated regionalist discourse composed of claims for a
separate administrative budget of the province, and for an administrative reorganisation
of Dobrogea more appropriate to regional needs, and requests for incentives for regional
economic development.89 Gathered around this regionalist political agenda, numerous
Dobrogean departmental delegations lobbied the King and the Parliament for full
political rights in 1893, 1899, 1902 and 1905.90
3.4 ‘Political Rights Without Liberties’: Dilemmas of Citizenship in Northern Dobrogea,

1908–13
The slowness of Dobrogeans’ emancipation expressed the citizenship dilemmas faced by
Romanian political elites in Dobrogea: an emancipation en bloc of Dobrogea’s multi-eth-
nic population would have contradicted Romania’s ius sanguinis citizenship legislation.
In 1909, invoking the principle according to which ‘the Constitution grants political
rights only to [ethnic] Romanians’, Prime Minister Brãtianu reiterated his determination
to apply citizenship legislation ‘in the same spirit on both sides of the Danube.’91 In other
words, Romanian political elites were unwilling to grant to non-Romanians in Dobrogea
the political rights that were denied to non-Romanians in Romania proper.92 Conse-
quently, on 19 April 1909, the rst Law on Dobrogeans’ citizenship granted full political
rights to former Ottoman citizens who resided in the province as of 11 April 1877 and
to their descendants (art. 3, point A) and to ‘Romanians from every state, regardless their
place of birth, who were owners of rural properties in Constanţa and Tulcea counties,’
88. Ioan Georgescu ‘InvaÏ ţãmõˆntul public ˆõ n Dobrogea’ in Dobrogea , cincizeci de ani, p. 651.
89. Ioan N. Roman, Dobrogea şi drepturile politice ale locuitorilor ei, Constanţa, 1905, pp. 88–9.
90. See Zeno Popov, ‘La situation et les luttes des Bulgares en Dobroudja du Nord (1878–1912)’ in Bulgarian
Historical Review, 19 (1991), p. 21; and Alexandru Rãdulescu & Ion Bitoleanu, Istoria românilor dintre Dunãre
şi Mare. Dobrogea, Bucharest, 1979, p. 298.
91. Rãdulescu & Bitoleanu, Istoria românilor dintre Dunãre şi Mare. Dobrogea, pp. 105–6.
92. Speech by Ion I. C. Brãtianu in Adunarea Deputaţilor, Dezbaterile, 1908–1909, pp. 105–6.
their descendants, providing that they renounce their previous citizenship (art. 3, point
b). 93 Together with the former Ottoman subjects in Dobrogea (raja), the law admitted
thus to full citizenship all ethnic Romanian rural colonists. Nonetheless, the law
excluded from political rights all post-1878 non-ethnic Romanian immigrants in Do-
brogea, either in the countryside or urban areas; it also excluded Romanians without
property, or those who owned only urban properties.
These stipulations provoked incendiary reactions among Romanian elites in Dobrogea,
who resented particularly the exclusion of urban Romanians from political rights.94
Ultimately, due to their intense political lobby, a new law on 14 April 1910 removed
rural properties as a precondition for full citizenship, and granted instead political rights
to all rural and urban Romanians ‘owners of immobile property in Constanta or Tulcea
counties, and domiciled there at the time of the law promulgation.’95 The text of the new
law remained, however, highly restrictive, and could not appease public opinion in
Dobrogea. As a result, on 3 March 1912, a Conservative government led by Petre P.
Carp issued yet another citizenship law for Dobrogea.96 Compared to the previous ones,
the new law was more inclusive, conferring political rights to: former Ottoman subjects
(raja), residents in Dobrogea as of 11 April 1877; to Turks and Tartars who had
emigrated from Dobrogea after the 1877–78 war, but returned in the province at least
two years by the time of the promulgation of the law; all categories of Romanian
population, namely autochthonous Romanians (the former Ottoman subjects—raja),
Romanian colonists who owned rural or urban property in the province, and Romanians
without property who had settled there by the time of the Law promulgation; and nally,
foreign colonists who acquired rural property in Dobrogea. In a dissimilationist spirit,
the law still excluded from political rights non-ethnic Romanians domiciled in urban
areas, namely the numerous category of Jewish, Armenian and Greek merchants who
‘in ltrated’ Dobrogea after 1878.
4. Modernisation as ‘Regress’: Women and Citizenship in Romania, 1864–1918

A third category excluded from full citizenship rights in Romania were women.
Although nominally committed to a liberal and universalistic de nition of citizenship,
the 1866 Romanian Constitution and the 1865 Romanian Civil Code were based on an
underlying gender inequality, denying women political participation, and depriving
married women of nationality, property and legal capacity. As such, the new bourgeois-
democratic political order was essentially dominated by males, who relegated women to
the ‘private sphere’ and monopolised forms of representation and allocation of resources
in the public sphere.
The 1866 Romanian Constitution proclaimed, in articles 5, 13, 14, and 27, the liberal
principles of popular sovereignty, civil equality and individual freedoms. However,
articles 3 and 18 of the Constitution limited the application of these principles to men,
placing women in the category of ‘legal incompetents’ together with children, criminals,
and those with handicaps. This denial of political participation added to the acute legal
93. See ‘The Law for Granting Political Rights to the Inhabitant s of the Constanţa and Tulcea Counties’ in
Hamangiu, Codul General al Romaniei, Bucharest, 1910, Vol. V, p. 392.
94. See Vasile KogaÏ lniceanu, Dobrogea , 1895–1909. Drepturi politice fãrã libertãti, Bucharest, 1910.
95. Hamangiu, Codul General, Vol. VI, p. 357. Compared to the previous law, the only modi cation was in
fact the removal of the word ‘rural’ from article 3, point B (see above).
96. See ‘The Law for the Interpretation and Completion of Articles 3 and 4 of the Law of April 15, 1910, for
Granting Political Rights to Dobrogeans ’ in Hamangiu, Codul General, Vol. IV, pp. 936–8.
inferiority of women under the 1865 Romanian Civil Code. Article 1285 excluded
females from the lineage of parental inheritance and deprived married women of
property rights over the paraphernalia of the household. Moreover, articles 307 and 308
admitted legal investigation on maternity, but forbade investigation on paternity. The
principle of gender inequality also framed the legal relationship between husband and
wife; article 195 read that ‘the husband owes protection to his wife, while the wife owes
subjection to her husband.’97 Consequently, married women lacked the legal capacity to
represent the family, to decide about the education or property of children and to
exercise certain professions without the express permission of the husband (art. 197, 199,
and 200).
Apparently, the exclusion of women from civil rights was in line with the patriarchal
tradition in the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Yet the new civil code
degraded in many respects the legal status women had enjoyed under the previous civil
codes, The Codul Caragea (1818) in Wallachia and The Legiuirea Calimachi (1817) in
Moldavia. Compiled mainly after medieval collections of Byzantine laws, both codes
subjected women to the obedience of men. However, while incorporating elements of the
unwritten local mores (obiceiul paÏ mõˆntului—the custom of the land), these codes of laws
were more permissive towards women’s rights, such as their access to inheritance and
to administering family property. The Moldavian Codul Calimach stipulated, in its
articles 916, 917 and 918, equal rights of men and women for inheritance of goods and
real-estate. 98 The Wallachian Legiurirea Caragea excluded women from direct lineage
of inheritance, but stipulated nevertheless that, in case of parents who were unable to
provide a dowry for their daughter at the time of her marriage, the brother was obliged
to endow his sister with a dowry ‘for his own honor.’99
The denial of women’s inheritance rights was thus a departure from the local mores
and established juridical practices in the Principalities. Furthermore, since the 1865
Romanian Civil Code was an almost literal translation of the 1804 Napoleonic Code,
supplemented occasionally with in uences from the Italian and Belgian Civil Codes, the
limitation on women’s civil rights was a direct result of the ‘Westernisation’ of the
Romanian legislation.100 Authoritative studies on women’s status in France have high-
lighted the direct relation between the participation of women in the French revolution
and their exclusion from civil and political rights.101 In the rst stage of the revolution
women took an active part in the citizenry, and helped shape the outcome of revolution-
ary events. However, once they began to express their speci c interests, the
‘uncontrollable’ and ‘unrestrained’ women were perceived as a threat to the new
republican order, and were therefore excluded from substantive citizenship partici-
pation. 102 In Romania, the exclusion of women from civic and political rights was not
triggered by women’s assault on the public sphere, but by the adoption of a ‘normative’
Western legislation. During the 1866 constitutional debates over women’s status, the
liberal deputy Cezar Boliac invoked liberal principles and the juridical tradition in the
Principalities, and pleaded for women’s enfranchisement. His view was successfully
opposed by the deputy Ion Heliade-Rãdulescu. Although he declared himself in favor of
women’s emancipation, Heliade-Rãdulescu objected that such a sudden reform would
97. Hamangiu, Codul Civil Adnotat, Bucharest, 1925, Vol. I, p. 222, my emphasis.
98. See Codul Calimach, Bucharest, 1958, art. 916, 917, and 918, p. 357.
99. Legiuirea Caragea. Ediţie criticaÏ , Bucharest, 1955.
100. Legiuirea Caragea. Ediţie criticaÏ , p. 95.
101. See Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Ithaca, 1998,
and Ofwen H. Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution, Toronto, 1992.
102. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere.
put Romania ‘ahead of time’ and much above the status enjoyed by women in Western
European countries. Consequently, Heliade-Rãdulescu defended a restricted male suf-
frage, and advocated only a gradual emancipation of women in Romania.103
Heliade-Rãdulescu’s discourse on women’s rights expressed the dominant gender
ideology of the new bourgeois-democratic political order. Citizenship legislation set the
dividing line between an universal and rational public sphere, which was monopolised
by men, and a particular and intimate private sphere, where bourgeois notions of
domesticity and intimacy conferred an important role to women as mother, wives and
housekeepers. The symbolic inclusion of Romanian women in the national community
was not based on their nationality—which, according to the Civil Code, could not be
transmitted to children on a maternal line and was to be lost by women marrying an
alien—but on women’s role in the reproduction of the nation and in educating the future
generation. 104 The emancipation of women was therefore: conceived in a gradual
manner, in order to minimise its impact on the established political order; con ned solely
to limited domains of participation in the public sphere—such as elementary or
vocational education—which would strengthen the bourgeois family and reinforce
women’s speci c social roles; and nally, accepted only for special categories of
women, such as young spinsters and widows, whose emancipation would not disrupt the
unity of the bourgeois family. Thus, in May 1878, a governmental bill on communal law
proposed granting widows the right to delegate their vote for local administration to one
of their sons, or sons-in-law105; in the same vein, in 1884, a group of liberal deputies
proposed a bill for granting spinsters and widows political rights for parliament.106 These
proposals invariably met with the hostility of the parliamentary majority. While the cause
of women’s emancipation was making signi cant progress in Western European coun-
tries, many Romanian politicians argued, from a conservative stance, for a departure
from the Western normative model, and advocated the emancipation of women in
Romania ‘through an integral education, and not through laws, as in the West.’107
5. Enlarging the Political Public Sphere: Citizenship as a ‘Ruling Class Strategy’
In the period 1866–1918, Romanian political life was characterised by passionate debates
over the enlargement of the political system established by the 1866 Constitution. By and
large, we can identify two competing visions on citizenship participation in politics: one
promoted by the Conservative Party, which pleaded for maintenance of a restricted
franchise and another promoted by the Liberal Party, which favoured a gradual extension
of the electoral body to include new social and political categories. The confrontation
between these two visions occurred regularly, occasioned by parliamentary debates over
the adoption of electoral, property, educational, or citizenship laws.
Stimulated by political debates over the expansion of the franchise, numerous
representatives of Jews, women, and Dobrogeans intensi ed their campaign for civic and
103. See Ion Helidade-RaÏ dulescu, Echilibru ˆõ ntre antiteze sau spiritul şi materia, Bucharest, 1859–69.
104. For the denationalisation and citizenship exclusion of married women, see Ursula Vogel, ‘Is Citizenship
Gender-Speci c?’ in Ursula Vogel & Michael Mann, eds, The Frontiers of Citizenship, London, 1991, pp. 58–85;
and Ursula Vogel, ‘Marriage and the Boundaries of Citizenship’ in Bart von Steenbergen, ed., The Condition of
Citizenship, London, 1994, pp. 76–89.
105. See Dezbaterile AdunaÏ rii Deputaţilor, Session 1877/1878, Meeting of 15 May 1878, p. 2928.
106. Ibid, Session 1883/1884, Meeting of May 6, 1884, pp. 2353–2355.
107. Heliade-RaÏ dulescu, Vot şi raÏ svot. Cu Modi carea legii electorale ˆõ n favoarea intelectualilor de
Ion-Heliade RaÏ dulescu- ul, Bucharest, 1868, p. 17.
political emancipation. Their simultaneous struggle for an enlarged political participation

did not result, however, in collaboration. Jewish associations, Dobrogean regionalists,
and feminist societies employed divergent and even contradictory emancipation strate-
gies, which further diminished their impact on the existing political order. Facing the
steady refusal of Romanian politicians to grant them full citizenship rights, Jews had to
rely ultimately on the international community for securing their emancipation. By
contrast, Romanian regionalist leaders in Northern Dobrogea, as well as numerous
women’s organisations, emphasised their loyalty to the Romanian national cause, and
opted for a strategic alliance with the Liberal Party for their prospective emancipation.
First, in their ght for political rights, Romanian regionalists in Dobrogea employed
a peculiar dichotomy of exclusion/inclusion that attempted to concomitantly enlarge their
political support, while reducing competition from local non-Romanian economic elites.
Thus, on the one hand, Romanian regionalists attempted to forge a political coalition
with local Turkish and Bulgarian elites, arguing that ‘the voice of native Dobrogeans has
to be heard and taken into account.’108 On the other hand, the avatars of Dobrogean
regionalists turned against the mercantile and cosmopolitan former Ottoman economic
elites in the province, seen as a challenge to the economic supremacy of local Romanian
elites. Jewish, Greek, and Armenian merchants in Dobrogea were thus portrayed as
‘parasites’, ‘Bloodsuckers of the Orient’, ‘plagues in the body of the province’, and
‘people without country.’109 This exclusionary attitude of Dobrogean regionalists weak-
ened the basis of Dobrogeanism, and compromised its political impact. In reaction, Petru
Grigorescu, a Romanian regionalist leader in Constanta, had to explicate that:
When we speak of foreigners… we do not mean the [ethnically diverse]

autochthonous population of Dobrogea, whose rights we often supported and
defended together with the rights of the Romanians, but we mean all kinds of
parasites who invaded Constanţa to the detriment of Romanianism and of the
indigenous population. They formed numerous villages and monopolised the
trade of the province, exploiting shamelessly the rural population.110
The regionalist discourse of resistance to centralisation in Dobrogea can be thus

characterised as an ‘accommodating one’, since it was ultimately in line with the
Romanian national ideology.111 The regionalist campaign against the separate adminis-
trative regime in the province was based on the argument that ‘Dobrogea is a Romanian
province’, with a reliable and loyal population, who deserves participation in the political
life of the country.112 In other words, regionalists were willing to play the role of local,
secondary elites of the Romanian political order in Dobrogea. They portrayed therefore
the separate administration in Dobrogea as a gross political mistake of Romanian
political elites, which alienated their potential allies at the local level, and thus
undermined the Romanian nationalist cause in the province.
In a similar vein to the regionalist discourse in Dobrogea, movements for women’s
emancipation assumed the gender roles envisioned by the bourgeois-democratic political
108. Roman, Dobrogea şi drepturile politice, p. 121.

109. Ionescu, Dobrogea õˆn pragul, p. 346.
110. Grigorescu, ‘Toleranţa culpabilaÏ ’, Constanţa, No. 158, April 21, 1896, in Cestiuni Dobrogen e, Constanţa,
1910, pp. 152–53.
111. On the distinction between ‘resistant’ regional discourses, based on ‘a claim to nationhood ’ and
‘accommodating ’ regional discourses, based on ‘variations on a common national theme’, see Celia Applegate,
‘A Europe of Regions: Re ections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times’ in American
Historical Review (October 1999), pp. 1157–1182, p. 179.
112. Roman, Dobrogea şi drepturile politice, p. 157.
order, and challenged only rarely the existing political system. Surely, the feminist
discourse accused the curtailment of women’s rights under the Civil Code: ‘read the
Civil Code and you will become a feminist’ wrote one of the rst feminist activists in
Romania, Cornelia Emilian.113 Nevertheless, claims for women’s emancipation were not
supported by theories of gender equality, but by invoking women’s role in reproducing
the national culture. Thus, in a discourse with strong anti-Semitic overtones, Emilian
deplored women’s legal assimilation with ‘alien’ ethnic minorities, and emphasized
women’s symbolic adherence to the Romanian national cause:
Although our own sons, on becoming men, humiliate us with their laws, placing
us among peoples without country—such as Jews and Gypsies—we, as moth-
ers, do not abhor our mission when we see them threatened in their existence.
Jews want to be naturalised, in other words they want to become masters over
a household they have not worked for. The Jew has the wealth of the country,
has its life, its soul, and its money—and that who has the money is the ruler.
The Romanian has the vote, has a title, and if he loses that, as well, than he can
declare his bankruptcy and go to work for the Jew. The Jewish disease is badly
threatening Moldavia, and so it is wise that decision-makers keep Jews away
from suffrage.114
In spite of this explicit adhesion of marginal groups to the national ideology, the
Romanian political system proved, however, little receptive to a gradual enlargement of
the political public sphere. An 1884 amendment to the Constitution revealed the limits
of the Liberal program of political emancipation, and provoked a major political split
within the party. The dominant Liberal faction led by I. C. BraÏ tianu rejected a bill for
universal suffrage promoted by the radical-liberals grouped around C. A. Rosetti, and
imposed instead only a limited expansion of the electoral body with those social
categories that would directly support the Liberal Party. Thus the constitutional amend-
ment endorsed the accession of upper urban social strata to the Senate, and to College
II of the Chamber of Deputies, previously reserved for landowners, and lowered
substantially the electoral income threshold for middle urban strata in College III of the
Chamber.115 This was a clear indication that the Liberal Party was not motivated in
enlarging the franchise, but utilised citizenship as a ‘ruling class strategy’ in order to
consolidate its political position.116 This strategy became more evident after the turn of
the century, when the Liberal Party intensi ed its campaign for sheltered industrialis-
ation. In order to undermine the economic ef ciency of the great landed estates, the main
rivals of the Liberal plans of industrialisation, the Liberal Party conducted a sustained
campaign for emancipating the impoverished sharecropper peasantry and transforming it
into independent farmers.117 To this end, the Liberals attempted to invest schools in rural
areas with an increased socio-cultural role, through active state intervention. They also
113. ‘Buletinul Ligei femeilor’ no. 9, February 1896, p. 7, quoted in Paraschiva Câncea, Mişcarea pentru
emanciparea femeii ˆõ n România, 1848–1948, Bucharest, 1976, p. 62. For a utilisation of the difference between
women’s civil rights under the 1817–18 Civil Codes in the Principalities, and women’s rights under Romania’s
1865 Civil Code as a political argument in favour of women’s emancipation , see Calipso Botez, ‘Drepturile femeii
in Constituţiunea viitoare,’ 22 January 1922, in Constituţia din 1923 ˆõ n dezbaterile contemporanilor, Bucharest,
1990, pp. 124–42.
114. Cornelia Emilian, ‘Mai multe femei’, 13 June 1893, in Cõˆte Ceva, Bucharest, 1909.
115. These changes enlarged the electorate of the urban college with 23,477 voters for the Chamber and 8,588
for the Senate. See Ion Bulei and Ion Mamina, Guverne şi guvernan ţi, Bucharest, 1994, p. 55.
116. For a comprehensiv e theory of citizenship as a ‘ruling class strategy’ of political domination, see Michael
Mann, ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship.’
117. See Eidelberg, The Great Romanian Peasant Revolt of 1907.
tried to build a vast network of rural bank-cooperatives meant to consolidate a solid

stratum of middle landowners as the basis for a prospective internal market necessary to
absorb the products of the state-sponsored industry and to generate the proletariat as the
working force required for industrialisation.118 However, instead of fostering a capitalist
transformation of the agriculture, the Liberal campaign unleashed social tensions in the
countryside and failed dramatically in the great 1907 peasant revolt.119 It was only in
October 1913 that, stimulated by the economic crisis of the great estates and by the
failure of their campaign for a capitalist transformation of agriculture ‘from below,’ a
new generation of Liberal politicians led by Ion I. C. BraÏ tianu—the son of Ion C.
BraÏ tianu—launched plans for substantial land reform and universal franchise. Because of
the onset of the World War I, these plans for reform could no longer be discussed in
parliament. Ultimately, the emancipation of non-citizen subjects in Romania would occur
only later under the socio-political impact of the Great War and not through the
development of an inclusive political discourse. The following section examines the
successive emancipations of Dobrogeans and Jews and tries to account for the ‘missed
opportunity’ of women’s emancipation.
5.1 Citizenship and the Great War: Paths toward the Emancipation of non-Citizens in
Romania, 1914–18
The rst category of Romanian ‘subjects’ to be granted political rights before the First
World War was the inhabitants of Dobrogea. Their 1909–13 political emancipation was,
however, only partially provoked by the intense political campaign for political rights
conducted by Dobrogean regionalist leaders. Most of the motivation behind the Do-
brogeans’ emancipation was in fact geo-political. Alarmed by the escalation of political
tensions in the Balkans, Romanian politicians expressed concern that Dobrogea’s
separate administrative status could fuel Bulgaria’s irredentist policy, and argued
therefore for ‘the de nitive and constitutional incorporation’ of Dobrogea into Roma-
nia.120 Moreover, the granting of political rights to Dobrogeans was also an indication
that the separate administration in the province had achieved satisfactory results. In only
thirty- ve years (1878–1913) Northern Dobrogea was effectively assimilated by a
growing Romanian ethnic majority. Consequently, in 1913, a series of laws regarding the
local administration and the juridical system nally abolished Dobrogea’s separate
administrative organisation and homogenised its legislation with that in Romania proper.
Although it followed a different path, the emancipation of Jews was also intimately
connected to Romania’s foreign policy and geo-political position. In spite of the large
participation of Jews in the Romanian army, estimated at approximately 23,000
soldiers or 10% of their total number121, the legal situation of the Jewish population
worsened during World War I. Adopted on 15 March 1915, ‘The Law for the
Control of Foreigners’ subjected foreign residents in Romanian territory to strict
governmental control, obliging them to acquire a special residence permit from Roma-
nian authorities. Through ambiguous juridical formulations, the Law treated Jewish
subjects in Romania as virtual foreigners. Although theoretically exempt from the
118. The leading gure of the sustained educational campaign conducted by Liberals in the countrysid e was
Spiru Haret, the Ministry of Education in 1897–99, 1901–04, and 1907–10. For a comprehensive account of Haret’s
educational reforms, see Emil Bâldescu, Spiru Haret ˆõ n ştiinţaÏ , loso e, pedagogie , ˆõ nvaÏ ţaÏ mõˆnt, Bucharest, 1972;
and Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, pp. 41–47.
119. See Eidelberg, The Great Romanian Peasant Revolt of 1907.
120. Titu Maiorescu, ‘Chestia Dobrogei’ in Epoca, Bucharest, XIV, no. 260, 6 November 1903.
121. See Wilhelm Filderman, AdevaÏ rul asupra problemei evreieşti din Romania, ˆõ n lumina textelor religioase
şi a statisticii, Bucharest, 1925, in Iancu, Emanciparea evreilor, p. 135–7.
obligation of applying for a special residence permit, Jews were nevertheless compelled
to prove their right of permanent residence in Romanian territory. This procedure
occasioned numerous anti-Jewish abuses by the administration.122 In the face of this
overt discrimination, Jewish associations intensi ed their international propagand a for
emancipation. The rst diplomatic opportunity for Jewish emancipation was the Separate
Peace Treaty signed by Romania with the Central Powers in May 1918. Due to a
concerted Jewish lobby, the Treaty stipulated, in its articles 27 and 28, the access to
naturalisation of Romanian Jews, providing that they either fought in the Romanian
army, or were descended from parents settled in the country who had never been subjects
of a foreign power. These stipulations were further consecrated by ‘The Law for the
Naturalisation of Foreigners Born in the Country’ adopted by the Romanian Parliament
on 25 August 1918. The law functioned, however, only for several weeks. With the fall
of the government led by Alexandru Marghiloman on 10 November 1918, all laws
passed by the ‘collaborationist’ Parliament that functioned under the German occupation
were abolished.
The end of the World War I brought a striking legal paradox. Following the 1918
integration of Transylvania, the Banat, Bukovina and Bessarabia into Romania, a large
Jewish population gained access to Romanian state citizenship;123 at the same time, Jews
of the Old Kingdom, who had in fact a much stronger connection to the Romanian state,
were still in the inferior legal situation of non-citizen subjects. Addressing this anomaly,
and determined to provide a domestic legislative solution to the Jewish question prior to
the Paris Peace Conference, the Romanian Prime Minister Ion I.C. Brãtianu issued, on
28 December 1918, a decree granting accession to naturalisation of Jews who either
fought in the Romanian army or were born in the country and had not bene ted from
foreign protection. Following protests over the restrictive stipulation of the decree, in
May 22 1919, the Romanian government issued yet another decree—this time more
permissive—that granted access to naturalisation to Jews descendant from Romanian
subjects. This law of emancipation came, however, much too late. Romanian political
elites proved unable to provide a viable solution to the emancipation of Jews. As a result,
the Treaty on Minorities—included in the Peace Treaty between Romania and Austria
concluded by the Supreme Council on 10 September 1919 at Saint Germain—took the
last steps toward the emancipation of Romania’s Jews; it also granted full political rights
and international protection to national minorities in Greater Romania. The Romanian
political establishment strongly opposed these stipulations. Both Prime Minister I. C.
Brãtianu and his successor, Arthur Vãitoianu, preferred to resign rather than accept what
they regarded as an unmasked intrusion in Romania’s domestic policy. However,
geo-political interests ultimately prevailed over nationalist reasoning: on 9 December
1919, Prime Minister Vaida-Voevod signed the Minority Convention, which became
subsequently part of Romania’s internal legislation. In 1923, the new Constitution of
Romania further consecrated these stipulations, by granting full civil and political rights
to ethnic minorities in Romania.
Last but not least, the great socio-political upheaval of the World War I offered a
unique occasion for women’s emancipation in Romania. Given the general mobilisation
122. See ‘Loi pour le contrôle des étrangers,’ and ‘Réglement pour le contrôle des étrangers,’ Bucharest, 1915.
123. See Declarations of Union with Romania by Sfatul Tarii of the Democratic Republic of Moldavia (27
March 1918, accepted by Romania on 22 April 1918); by the Romanian National Council of Bukovina (15
November 1918, accepted by Romania on 18 December 1919); and by the Great National Assembly from Alba
Iulia of Romanians of Transylvania, the Banat and Hungary (1 December 1918, accepted by Romania on 11
December 1918), and the subsequent inclusive legislation that granted Romanian citizenship to all permanent
inhabitants of these historical provinces.
of men, the war required an unprecedented participation of women in the public sphere:
in September 1916, shortly after Romania’s entry into the war, a royal decree granted
women temporary legal competence over the property of their household.124 The
increasing participation of women in the war effort contributed also to the radicalisation
of their emancipation programs. In 1917 and 1918, women’s associations addressed
numerous memorandums to the Romanian Parliament, claiming political rights. Their
campaign received encouraging reactions; parliamentary debates over the expansion of
suffrage devoted considerable attention to women. In September 1917, the deputy
Constantin Nacu proposed a bill stipulating integral civil rights for women. Nevertheless,
due to grave war events, the project could not be discussed by the Parliament. Postponed
sine die, the legislative emancipation of women thus became a missed opportunity.
Adopted several years after the war, the 1923 Constitution of Romania granted universal
male suffrage, but accepted women’s enfranchisement only in principle: its article 6
stipulated that ‘Special laws, voted with a majority of two thirds, will determine the
conditions under which women can exercise political rights.’125 The civil and political
emancipation of women in Romania was thus very slow, and occurred only as part of
the general process of administrative integration and legislative unification in interwar
Greater Romania. In 1929, women were granted political rights in local elections, while
in 1932, a new Romanian Civil Code nally granted women full civic emancipation.
In summary, the socio-political upheaval of World War I stirred an unprecedented
liberalisation of access to Romanian state citizenship. The 1923 Constitution completed
the long process of emancipation of non-citizens in Romania and transformed the
citizenship body into a multi-ethnic and pluri-confessional community. Citizenship
liberalisation was accompanied by a major socio-political reorganisation of the country.
Comprehensive reforms such as universal male suffrage (1918), and massive land
redistribution (1921) remodelled Romania into a full parliamentary democracy. In spite
of the unprecedented enlargement of the political public sphere, the civil society of the
nineteenth century failed, however, to develop into a lasting democracy in the interwar
period. First, the system of ‘universal’ suffrage implemented by the Constitution still
contained a notable restrictive criterion: that was gender. The slowness of women’s
emancipation proved that, although lumped in the same categories with ethnic and
religious minorities in Romania, and forced to lobby for emancipation in the same
manner with them, the exclusion of women from civil and political rights was in fact of
a different nature, and had an important ‘structural’ dimension for the bourgeois political
order. 126 Furthermore, instead of fostering new forms of ‘constitutional patriotism
(Verfassungspatriotismus)’ the generalised access of ethnic minorities to Romanian
citizenship generated instead a symbolic differentiation between formal state citizenship
and membership in the Romanian national community. As a result, interwar political life
was dominated by radical de nitions of national identity that discriminated between
Romanian citizens ‘by blood’ and Romanian citizens ‘by papers’, and militated for the
exclusion of the latter from substantive socio-political rights.
124. See ‘Monitorul O cial’, 24 September 1916, p. 6479.

125. Articol 6, Title II, ‘Despre Drepturile Românilor,’ in Constituţiunea PromulgataÏ cu Decretul Regal no.
1360 din 28 Martie, Bucharest, 1923, p. 611.
126. See Habermas, ‘Further Re ections on the Public Sphere’ in Graig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public
Sphere, Cambridge MA, 1992, pp. 427–30. For debates on the nature of women’s exclusion from the public sphere,
see Landes, Women and the Pubic Sphere, and Keith Michael Baker, ‘De ning the Public Sphere in Eighteenth
Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas’ in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 198–208.
Habermas, ‘Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity’ in Habermas, The New Conservatism,
Cambridge, MA, 1989, pp. 249–267.
6. Conclusions
This article proposed a historically grounded analysis of the emergence and progressive
enlargement of the political public sphere in Romania between 1866–1918, around
issues of citizenship, ethnicity gender, and nationalism. In doing so, the article at-
tempted to test the relevance of different concepts of citizenship for the speci c context
of Romanian history; explored ways in which citizenship legislation served as a ruling
strategy of Romanian political elites; paid special attention to the legal status of
marginal social, ethno-religious, and gender categories in that given period; and, last but
not least, evaluated the impact of geo-political events on Romanian citizenship
doctrine.
What were the main features of Romanian citizenship legislation in the period
1866–1918? Assessing the political and ideological legacy of the French Revolution and
of subsequent nationalist movements in the nineteenth century, Rogers Brubaker
identi ed six underlying features of an archetypal model of nation-state citizenship,
namely ‘egalitarian, sacred, national, democratic, unique and socially consequential.’127
Surely, this model has never existed in its ‘pure’ form in historical reality. As Brubaker
pointed out, the perpetual interplay, contradictions, and variations among these member-
ship norms have generated signi cant cross-national differences in citizenship
doctrines.128 In regard to admission to citizenship, these differences have revolved
generally around the underlying tension between the normative striving for an egali-
tarian and democratic citizenship on the one hand, and the exclusionary and
homogenising tendencies that the ‘sacred’, ‘unique’, and ‘national’ character of national
community membership entails, on the other hand.129 During the period 1866–1918,
Romanian citizenship legislation was characterised by the above-mentioned tension
highlighted by Brubaker. As this article has pointed out, Romanian citizenship shared
most of the essential features of the model of nation-state membership, such as
‘national’, ‘sacred’, ‘unique’, and ‘socially consequential’. Romanian legislation imple-
mented ‘from above’, a ‘primordial’ and ‘thick’ understanding of citizenship,130 that
de ned the body of citizens as a community of shared language, common origin, and
historical destiny, and assigned important rights and duties to citizenship status. Never-
theless, Romanian citizenship departed from the ideal-typical model of nation-state
citizenship in two important aspects. First, on the political level, the democratic
character of citizenship was undermined by the inequality of the electoral system, based
on a virtual distinction between active and passive citizens. Second, and more impor-
tantly, Romanian legislation adopted the principle of ius sanguinis as an exclusive basis
of ascribing citizenship. As a result, the numerous permanent non-ethnic Romanian
residents was excluded from citizenship, and, what is more, it was also denied access to
naturalisation. This feature undermined the egalitarian character of nation-state member-
ship, and transformed citizenship from a universal and unitary status into a multitude of
partial and intermediary forms of membership. In analysing the hybrid legal statuses of
women, Jews and Dorbrogeans, this article argued that the Liberal Party in Romania
utilised citizenship legislation as an instrument of social closure, in order to control
127. Brubaker, ‘Immigration, Citizenship, and the Nation-State in France and Germany: A Comparative
Historical Analysis’, in International Sociology, 5 (1990), pp. 379–407, in Turner and Hamilton, eds, Citizenship,
p. 311.
128. Brubaker, ‘Immigration, Citizenship and the Nation-State’, p. 314.
129. Brubaker, ‘Immigration, Citizenship and the Nation-State’, p. 314.
130. For a typology on citizenships implemented ‘from above’ of ‘from below’, see Turner, ‘Outline of a theory
of citizenship’, p. 189; on ‘primordial’ versus ‘learned’ and ‘thick’ versus ‘thin’ de nitions of citizenship, see Tilly,
‘Citizenship, Identity and Social History’ in Tilly, ed., Citizenship, Identity and Social History, pp. 1–17.
social change and to curb competition from rival socio-political groups. Finally, on the
basis of this case study, the article asserts two theoretical conclusions for the study of
citizenship, namely: (1) citizenship is not a static and formal legal category, but a
dynamic political concept, organically linked with issues of personal and collective
identity, and social change; and (2) citizenship is not a monolithic and universal-
egalitarian status, but a dynamic assemblage of heterogeneous legal and socio-political
statuses.131
RESUME Cet article tente de contribuer historiquement à l’émergence de l’institution de la

citoyenneté en Roumanie. Conçu comme une analyse de la législation roumaine de 1866 à 1918,
cet article se penche particulièrement sur les contradictions entre les prétentions universalistes de
l’idéologie libérale démocrate bourgeoise et sa pratique de la citoyenneté qui ne donna le vote ni
aux femmes, ni a nombre d’hommes ou encore aux membres d’importantes minorités ethniques et
religieuses. Cet article se penche particulièrement sur le statut légal de ces catégories de
non-citoyens, sur leur politique d’émancipation et sur leur relation avec l’idéologie nationale
dominante.
ZUSSAMENFASSUNG Der Autor gibt einen Überblick über die rumänische Gesetzgebung zwischen
1866 und 1918 und zeigt das Entstehenund die Entwickung der Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetze in
Rumänien. Der Artikel konzentriert sich auf den Widerspruch zwischen der Forderungnach
Universalität der bürgerlich-demokratischen Ideologie einerseitsund der hierarchischen und
unliberalen Handhabun g des Staatsbürgerrechtsandererseits, die einer beträchtlichen Anzahl von
Männern bürgerliche Rechte aberkannte, Frauen entnationalisierte sowie ethnische und religiöse
Minderheiten vonder Staatsbürgerschaft ausschloß. Der Autor berücksichtigt insbesondere den
rechtlichen Status dieser Bevölkerungsgruppen, ihre Emanzipationsbestrebungen und ihr Verhält-
nis zu der vorherrschenden nationalen Ideologie.
131. For other works on citizenship that reinforce this conclusion, see Margaret R. Somers, ‘Citizenship and
the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy’ in American
Sociological Review, 58 (1993), pp. 587–620; and Tilly, Citizenship, Identity and Social History.

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European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire, Vol. 8, No.

The Unyielding Boundaries of

1. Citizenship, Nation and State-Building in Romania, 1866–1918

1.2 Being a Citizen in Romania: Rights and Duties of Citizenship

1.3 Romanian State-Citizenship as a Privilege of Ethnic Romanians

denying the access of non-Christian foreigners to Romanian citizenship. Article 7 of the

from abroad. According to some juridical interpretations, ethnic Romanians from

43. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. I, p. 343.

2. From ‘Denizens’ to Unwanted Citizens: The Status of Jews in Romania

Treaty (July 1878) conditioned diplomatic recognition of Romania’s independence upon

60. Muraru, Constituţiile Romaniei, p. 34.

3. Citizenship and Assimilation: The Integration of Northern Dobrogea into

63. Volovici, Ideologia naţionalistaÏ , p. 8.

Romanian national identity and Christianity. While numerous Romanian politicians

3.1 Citizenship Legislation in Northern Dobrogea

3.2 Ethnic Colonisation and Land Nationalisation in Northern Dobrogea, 1878–1913

73. Codul General, p. 268.

3.3 Centralisation versus Regionalism: Strategies of Political Emancipation Employed

83. Statistica din Romania, Bucharest, 1879, p. 3.

3.4 ‘Political Rights Without Liberties’: Dilemmas of Citizenship in Northern Dobrogea,

4. Modernisation as ‘Regress’: Women and Citizenship in Romania, 1864–1918

5. Enlarging the Political Public Sphere: Citizenship as a ‘Ruling Class Strategy’

political emancipation. Their simultaneous struggle for an enlarged political participation

When we speak of foreigners… we do not mean the [ethnically diverse]

The regionalist discourse of resistance to centralisation in Dobrogea can be thus

108. Roman, Dobrogea şi drepturile politice, p. 121.

tried to build a vast network of rural bank-cooperatives meant to consolidate a solid

124. See ‘Monitorul O cial’, 24 September 1916, p. 6479.

RESUME Cet article tente de contribuer historiquement à l’émergence de l’institution de la

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124. See ‘Monitorul O cial’, 24 September 1916, p. 6479.